Needles & Grooves

I'm not up to date on this whole thing. Why would artists take their stuff down? I only know that they were being acquired, this is a genuine question.

@Colonel4Bin A lot of them are understandably very disappointed, angry and anxious about the future of the platform. I haven't seen many say they are taking their stuff down for sure but it's always a risk, anyway. The general vibe today is that a lot of independent musicians want to move away from it.

Oh wow, I was completely out of the loop on this. I already have all the downloads, but I also kind of liked the idea that I could get a hold of them all again if I needed. Sounds like things are potentially bad for the future based on your post. Who's buying them?

@Turbo I've got all mine, as well, but I'm downloading everything again in FLAC in case I ever want to go down that route (an eventuality I've been preparing for since like 2009, lol).

@Turbo Funnily enough, I only found out a few months ago that it was even possible for artists to take down music you had bought; I also thought your purchases were available forever once you'd bought them. They were bought by Epic Games, the makers of Fortnite.

Good point. I have MP3 quality files but I may want to eventually switch to high res. I'm in the process of switching to Tidal from Spotify and I'm starting to take quite a liking to the CD quality files.

i love bandcamp and it gives the best chance of actual revenue coming (one of the few things epic does that is good.. they like money and sharing it even though fortnite is basically a gambling system for kids).. how the hell will indie artists get their music out now.. soundcloud is not the best because of the limit on the amount of minutes a standard user has and its not like spacehey will suddenly pick up traction

I knew never deleting 200 GBs of mp3s would be a good idea Tbf I only listen to Spotify on my work computer, everything else is mp3s

Shocked at how many are not archiving FLAC and using Opus when size matters.

@debianlinux I could be wrong but doesn’t opus not work on many mobile devices? That’s why I never did it. iOS doesn’t let you use it unless you have foobar or some other third party apps. Phone is the only reason for file size mattering for me

I don’t think indie musicians will move away from it until epic does something like make artist payments substantially lower. I hope they keep it so if you buy physical media you can still get a free high res download

@MikeH you may be right, I use 3rd party apps because the factory ones have terrible interfaces anyhow. I can't speak for iOS but PowerAMP is my preferred android player. I use foobar on my desktops. I honestly can't recall the last time I saw or heard a MP3 file. At any rate, if file size is truly a concern it seems a forgone tradeoff to use 3rd party apps.

@debianlinux for me, i usually care about sound quality but i only stream from my phone for convenience (pretty much only do it in the car). apple music + bluetooth is totally fine for me for that purpose. downloading files, converting to opus, transferring to my phone then playing through a third party app is a bit of a hassle.