[maxton]

I only first heard about this company earlier this year, and was pretty excited because they were the only way to buy DRM-free lossless, CD-quality music at a reasonable price (without having to ship and rip an actual CD). But I was concerned that their business model was unsustainable - keeping an inventory of millions of physical discs is a big ask.

It's surprising to me that there is still no iTunes-like service that just sells CD-quality audio. Sure there is HDTracks, but their price is way too high to be reasonable (usually double the iTunes price, or more) and their selection is pretty limited. Even Amazon's music store, with it's "Auto-Rip" feature when you buy a real CD, only gives you 256k MP3s. So for now, the most reasonable way for me to download FLACs is to torrent.

[erikschoster]

Bandcamp and many independent music shops and labels (like electrocd, boomkat, etc) offer flac downloads. It’s too bad streaming services like Spotify don’t support direct purchases of drm free files like bandcamp does, I’ve never understood what the downside to giving the option to purchase files would be for them.

[ilikehurdles]

Apparently there is Qobuz which seems to check all the boxes on paper. Haven't tried it though.

[scblock]

I would look into Qobuz. They do streaming, but also have a download store which is relatively reasonably priced and lets you download in FLAC or other lossless format. I've purchased quite a few albums from them and been quite satisfied.

[ghostly_s]

> It's surprising to me that there is still no iTunes-like service that just sells CD-quality audio.

Isn't that Tidal's thing?

[ilikehurdles]

Tidal rents out the audio, they don't sell it. All of Apple Music, Tidal, Google Music or whatever it's called now, and Spotify are lacking when it comes to simply having every song in my library. There are always tracks getting grayed out from each service's rental libary due to shifting agreements and margins.

That all said, Tidal sounds amazing and its videos are extremely high quality as well. I had serious issues with its desktop client last time I tried which caused me to switch back to spotify. The library is much smaller as well but that didn't matter as much because of the clear tradeoff in quality.

[smacktoward]

You're thinking of Pono: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pono_(digital_music_service)

... which unfortunately went out of business in 2017.

[perakojotgenije]

Deezer has HiFi plan

https://www.deezer.com/us/offers/hifi

[lanius]

Amazon Music HD

[neves]

Does this service has CD quality?