Use Bandcamp, but Do Not Trust Bandcamp

To prevent burying the leede. Buy your music, but make sure you download it in the best format you can and keep it backed up. Do NOT trust services like Bandcamp, Amazon, or Apple to keep your music you purchased.

My Relationship with My Music Library

I have made it no secret I love music. I love consuming it, decorating time with it, DJing, making it, all of it. Outside of a very brief stint in the 1990’s with Limewire and in the 2010’s with Spotify, then Apple Music I have always been buy on buying and having my music collection.

A large part of why I like to maintain my own collection is that I have such eclectic tastes that there is too many songs I enjoy that are not on streaming platforms. In fact so much of my purchased music isn’t even in MusicBrainz database that it makes managing it with popular tools a nightmare.¹

The second reason stems from my time with Apple Music. Apple Music with iTunes Match was a perfect solution to my eclectic collection plus streaming until they kept vanishing one of my all time favorite albums “Becoming X” by the Sneaker Pimps. I would be listening to it one week, and it would be gone the next. That only had to happen twice before I gave up on streaming services.

For the past many years I have been extremely happy buying the vast bulk of my music from Bandcamp and Amazon since I can get MP3s from both. In 2021 I moved all my music to my NAS running Plex and have used PlexAmp to use as my own personal streaming service. This has been perfect for me, the clients are great, i can still stream to raspi with speakers for home music, and I have access to access to all my music.

Sometimes finding a song to buy is hard, and there is a few tracks that are stream only. I am looking directly at you Orbital and am so mad that “Copenhagen” is stream only. But then you find amazing things like you can buy music directly from some of your favorite artists and even get lossless files. Huge shoutouts to My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult and Gary Numan.

My “Discovery” about Bandcamp and what I Bought

But these last few weeks is where things went wrong with Bandcamp for me.

Since I am experimenting with switching from Plex to Navidrome for my music I am a lot more aware of my music tagging and also how personal streaming means transcoding my music as it is sent to my device.

As part of this I decided to download all 1120 of my Bandcamp purchases as FLAC so that I am encoding from lossless instead of lossy MP3s when listening to my music. it’s not a huge quality difference but there is no cost other than my time to swap out all the files and update tags. There is also some small advantages to using FLACs when it comes to tagging but that is not important here.

What is important is that the more I started replacing old files with new downloads the more I discovered how much artists can and do edit the albums after they are put up for sale.

In some cases this is for the better! I have found some albums now have more bonus tracks than when I bought and downloaded them. I had one artist that upgraded the quality of the tracks. I am not sure if it was originally a mistaken upload or a remaster… and the most nefarious of cases… songs are gone.

Currently artists have the ability to “private” an album or take it off sale, but in that case if I own it, I can still buy it.

But somehow artists also have the ability to hard delete songs from albums.

In 2020 when I bought LEZ POP’s “THE GIRLS” EP, it had four tracks, and I love each one of them dearly. Track three is the standout on the album for me because it introduced me to Backxwash, an artist I am so glad I have learned about and own all her albums now.

On the day this post was put up the album on Bandcamp only has two songs now, and the Backxwash collab is gone. Even if I download it having bought it with four songs. I can’t get the FLAC versions of those songs anymore.

This is only one example, and I am sure there is various legal and licencing reasons for this but I didn’t buy the two song version of the EP, I bought the four song version. And I have the files I got when I wanted, but the upgrade is impossible now.

This isn’t the only case of this, but this is the most ouch one for me at the moment.

The Moral of the Story

So, moral of the story; Buy content, download the best version of that content, and keep it safe and backed up in at least two places. Once you download it, you never know if you will be able to download it again.

If you dig around some places of the internet they will be very clear about how important it is to buy DRM free and back up, but I wanted to add the part about “if you have the option, get it in the highest quality and most open formats you can just to be sure for later.”