+1 for Qobuz -- it's been where I buy my mainstream music for years now
(They used to have a really nice tarball option for downloading albums, but they axed that so now you have to download songs individually. Massive downgrade in QoL)
Not sure about movies or TV shows, but I buy songs on Bandcamp fairly often, though that's more less limited to indie bands (not strictly true but true enough).
Honestly though? I just buy CDs on eBay and rip them to FLAC, and stream them to myself with Jellyfin. CDs are DRM-free (meaning no potential legal issues stemming from breaking DRM), and are already digital so a conversion to FLAC incurs no quality loss. I use a Blu-ray drive, but USB DVD drive can do the job just fine and can be found for less than $20 on Amazon. Also, CDs can be had for fairly cheap because no one wants them anymore, especially if you buy a bunch at once.
This setup works fairly well up until around ~2016 music, when it becomes harder and harder to find CDs for albums released after that.
I've become kind of a grumpy old man who doesn't like much new music, so this works well for me. I still use YouTube music for music that I haven't bought CDs for yet, but I'd say that around ~80% of my music streaming is coming from my Jellyfin server now.
Much new good music can be bought DRM-free on Bandcamp.
If I wanted to most honestly buy a latest hit, I'd buy it in any DRM-ed form to fuel the sales, and then download it from torrents for convenient listening.
For music, Bandcamp and Qobuz both offer FLAC. iTunes store and Amazon both sell DRM-free downloads as well (though with lossy compression).
For video, there's never been a DRM-free store, unfortunately. Your only option there (besides hoisting the black flag) is to buy DVD/Blu-Ray releases and rip them yourself.
For video, the quite obscure CinéMutins[0] offers DRM-free downloads. The catalogue is in large part in French though and the movies that aren’t are hard-subbed in French.
There’s also basically no mainstream films, the focus is on social messages, but there are moderately-known films here and there.
This is a brilliant marketing move, imo. It feels like it adds a lot more support for the band than it actually does, which is probably like 11% more than the few bucks they would have otherwise gotten when you bought an album. Good will all around, at a small price.
Once upon a time they did, but I've been buying DRM-free music from iTunes for a long time now. The songs might have a watermark though? I don't really think so, but even if they did, I don't really have a problem with that.
Folks are saying Bandcamp, but surely that's only for the few indie artists that are on there (in comparison to the wider music ecosystem covered by Spotify). Please explain if I'm missing something here.
So I think a better answer is Qobuz[1], which I recently tried. I had a pleasant experience, where I downloaded DRM free FLAC files. I will use it again, but sparingly, as the cost adds up on top of the Spotify subscription and in comparison to piracy.
Bandcamp has a wider selection than you'd think. I've been pleasantly surprised at how often I will find an artist who sells music there. Qobuz is good too, I use them both.
I feel like I'm missing something, too. I just went there and searched for some very large artists (pulling from a Wikipedia article on best-selling artists of all time). Every single one was a fake profile, with no actual music by the artist.
Is there a normie search mode, or is this to be expected?
Bandcamp is primarily for independent artists and independent record labels. Depending on what music you listen to, you will either not be able to find anything (e.g. anything popular enough to be played on the radio), or you will be able to find more than on conventional streaming services (e.g. extreme metal).
Some big labels unfortunately have a "No Bancamp allowed" policy. This is the case for Century Media, which is owned by Sony, which has a large share in Spotify. I'm sure there are more examples like this.
The only ethical way I see to truly own all of your music is to pirate it, and support the artists by buying their merch and going to their shows.
Thank you! I was reading so many comments suggesting that everything should be on Bandcamp, but my searches did not show that. I was wondering if I was maybe on the wrong website.
For tv and movies you're basically hoping they had a DVD release. All the options options to "buy" are essentially one time fees to stream it on various services or when you get a download it will have HDCP drm on it. I can understand why they don't offer drm free versions because I would give them away like candy to my friends but it's mostly all available pirating anyway so I doubt it really matters.
I don't know why you're downvoted? If you want to stay legal, you gotta buy DVDs and Blu Rays, mostly used or in bargain bins to keep it relatively affordable.
No, it's not. It's the all you can eat buffet saying that 95% can eat all they want, but the 5% that keep sneaking food in their backpack to eat when they get can't do that anymore.
There's no lobster rolls stuffed into a backpack here. It's using the service as it was pitched, an all-you-can-eat buffer of API calls. Anything that limits what that means is scaling back access to that buffet.
If the new limits are anything less than 24 * 7 / 5 times the previous limits then power users are getting shafted (which understandably is the point of this).
What's worse with this model is that a runaway process could chew through your weekly API allotment on a wild goose chase. Whereas before the 5-hour quantization was both a limiter and guard rails.
No it's not. It's like an all you can eat buffet stating you can eat as much as you want and feed your friends and the homeless outside for a one time fee, and then realizing that the economic model made 0 sense to begin with and need to either state that you're only allowed to eat what you personally can, or increase the price to something that can sustain the amount of food being removed from the buffet.
I don't know what Sweden he has lived in, but me who has lived in Sweden through the 90s, 00s and 10s, I feel that practically the only thing people want to talk about is problems with immigration.
In relation to digging into a major economic shift during thee 30 years, moving Sweden from being one of the most egalitarian societies to consistently having an increasing economic gap.
This continues with the last budget, again giving tax cuts to, not salary work, but dividents.
"But isn't Sweden a high tax society", well, it still a quite high tax on work, but all other type of taxes has been remove or dramatically decreased (inheritance tax, gift tax, property tax, corporate tax, divident tax). So it is increasingly cheaper to earn money on others work (also your parents), but if cant afford to invest you will a hard time actually working yourself up by just putting hours in.
But hey, the problem is just "immigration" and that people cant talk about it (even though the only thing people talk about is just that).
I may be utterly wrong, but I understand from Swedish friends (I lived in Stockholm for a year, something more than ten years ago) that the problem is fairly recent, and comes from Government deciding to take in large numbers of refugees from middle east (Iraq, Kurds, etc).
The Government did the right thing, in terms of sharing the burden, plenty of locals don't like it at all, and in practical terms they make some good arguments.
I would like to have the complete opposite. Turn any app into a website so that I don't need to download them, and can just access them through my browser.
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