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Comment by pgwalsh | Hacker News Reader

Not the first time and not going to be the last. Unless you can download it to hardware you completely own and can make a backup, it's not really yours. Online purchases I can get on with, like Bandcamp are pretty good. I bought the new Globular album on CD and it took 10 days to get to me from the UK. I also had access to high quality downloads. That works, these other models do not.

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Bandcamp rules. I do still subscribe to Apple Music for cheap streaming, but for albums I really like, I'll spend the $8 on bandcamp for the high quality album download. Better support for the artist, and protection against license-pulling BS like this.

Even if you have a back up copy of a DRM file and they have turned off the authenticating services, that digital file is of now use to you until someone comes up with a way of decrypting it. This is what Microsoft did with their music service.

When MS ended Plays fer Sure sales two years after they started, and no DRM-free alternative (well, MS said you could burn to CD at a crap bitrate), that's when I learned to operate sails and a rudder. I tried to play nice, but I could see where this was going.

I still make digital purchases, but at the first sign of friction, at the first indication that I'm gonna get screwed somehow, I leave port and off to the open waters. Fuck 'em, I played by the rules until I discovered that I was the only one doing so.

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