I'm currently feeling the need to back up youtube videos that are important to me, because I figure it will be much harder soon.
But the biggest danger is that videos and channels can get removed by any, all, or no reason.
-Copyright middlemen/parasites
-Trolls
-Shifts in what’s politically or advertiser acceptable (see: https://www.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/14ddlng/unalived/)
-Massive data loss (see myspace)
-And especially the capricious whims of the channel owner.
A few years ago I realized an old playlist of mine was basically swiss cheese due to how many videos had been removed.
If you value it, save it now, because it will be gone sooner than you are prepared for.
There are many ways to handle automated saving of channels, including some gui frontends, but offhand the one I use and modify is: https://github.com/TheFrenchGhosty/TheFrenchGhostys-Ultimate...
Are they really though? It's my impression that even mass produced pressed CDs have a reputation for rotting on the order of 20-30 years. Vinyl lasts a century or more if you don't physically abuse it. CDs are certainly easier to rip though, so probably still worth it.
If you play a vinyl record enough to wear it out, at least you listened to it a lot before it wore out. With CDs, you might never listen to the music even once and come back years later to find it has destroyed itself.
One thing to note, is that the artist/label retain full control of what music is present, and as such can be removed at any time, even ones you paid for. See: https://get.bandcamp.help/hc/en-us/articles/4406122372119-Wh...
I use https://github.com/easlice/bandcamp-downloader to immediately archive flac files to my NAS after a purchase, then convert to those to a lossy for space saving format for mobile playback/family sharing as desired with a playlist. This way I have my archive, and the artists I like get their support.
artist decided to revise their own back catalog narrative so to speak, and I get it but holy crap the horses already left the stable.
So it is not for sale. I might find it on soulseek (thanks for the suggestion someone else ITT). the album meant a lot to me, as these things can when they're literally top playcounts for the year - clearly it does.
and it was, you know... super-indie, mom's basement kind of soundcloud & distrokid released production.
wonderful and now gone. Had I bought this on iTunes it would have gone into my offline library. it was for sale, and is no more.
my takeaway has been to get very defensive about any hyper-indie releases that I want to hang onto.
They might still have it around and be happy to provide it. :)