[bob1029]

Sounds like I need to check out bandcamp. Downloading flac is a lot more convenient than shipping media and manually ripping each item.

Edit: Just set up an account @ Bandcamp. This is looking pretty incredible. Seems like a perfect combination of direct payments to artists, discovery & ownership of purchased content. Looks like most digital downloads are very reasonably priced.

[runarberg]

Bandcamp is amazing. You can often stream the music before you buy, so you don’t risk buying stuff you don’t like. Then you have the option of buying a physical copy or just digital. If you buy a physical copy you can still download the flac and start listening immediately while you wait for the record/CD/cassette to arrive.

Bandcamp then goes beyond and publishes articles, blog posts and podcasts where you can discover new music. Even though this is technically advertised content, it feels more like an actual music article/radio show that you can enjoy regardless of if you intend to buy the featured music or not.

I can’t recommend Bandcamp enough.

[Kbelicius]

Just make sure that you have a copy of everything that you buy on bandcamp somewhere other than bandcamp. Stuff gets removed from there too.

[crtasm]

I thought you could re-download removed albums from your collection page? But can't find anything on mine to check with right now.

It's pretty incredible that in about a year they'll hit $1000m of payouts to artists.

[Kbelicius]

I don't think you can. If you go to see your purchases, by each purchase there should be a "download album" link. Next to one of my purchases instead there is a "more info" link and if I click it I get the following message: "Sorry, {album name} by {artist name} is no longer available. Please contact {artist name} for more information."

[crtasm]

But is the download link also missing from your collection page?

edit: I found one track that has the "more info" link in my purchases, searching for it on my collection gives no results. I guess that answers that :(

[eredengrin]

Qobuz is another service I've found useful, it has a lot of the more big name artists/recordings that might not be on bandcamp and you can download non-drm flac from it as well. The big downside is a lot of the downloads cost more than ripping an equivalent CD yourself, I can't figure out why that is but it's not always true so you just have to do an extra search first if you want to make sure they aren't ripping you off. But yes, bandcamp is also great, it's my preferred vendor when they have what I want.