I have just checked my Qobuz downloads account and to my horror I have lost the ability to re-download 7 out of the 50 downloads I have paid for because the license has been revoked.
I’m a little surprised they are allowed to do this given they are downloads I’ve paid for and that my music is for private use only. What happens if my hard drive fails and I need to re-download my music? I can understand streaming services being prone to license issues and this is one of the main reasons to download music, in what turns out to be the false belief that access to paid music will be future proofed. Fortunately the majority of my music has been purchased on CD for exactly this reason.
I guess the moral of the story is to always back up your music onto a hard copy in more than one location for piece of mind.
There’s a thread on this here.
Thanks HH. Must have missed that one.
One of the issues I was concerned about, which proved to be true, was that the warning email sent by Qobuz only listed 3 titles but several dozen are now unavailable to play.
It’s always good practice to have backups (several) of digital media and although I’d probably downloaded everything over the years it was fragmented across several computers/hard drives.
It was pretty surprising that we’d been able to redownload content for so long to be honest, but it had been a fairly unique reason to purchase from them.
Fortunately I have multiple backups of my downloads but it is the principle of it that annoys me.
If you’ve got backups it really doesn’t matter, so what’s the point of being annoyed. I get my downloads from High Res Audio and it’s limited to four downloads, which seems more than enough.
I don’t think we can blame Qobuz for this change, it’s the labels/rights holders who have the ultimate control.
I sometimes wonder if Qobuz allowed unlimited redownloads ‘under the radar’ but would also imagine if they weren’t allowed to do so it was explicitly clear in their contracts with the labels.
A big plus in my view is that they did give a warning, but unfortunately it was quite a short warning and didn’t detail the extent of the change accurately which may lead to some loss of trust, which would be a shame. I’d far rather support this small French outfit than Tidal/Apple/Amazon.
At least you have the backups. I redownloaded all I could before the full effects became clear, mainly to have a new consolidated library rather than bits here and there.
Download purchases straight away and backup - no problem. At least Qobuz gave a warning this was going to happen.
The thing is when psn or steam delist something that isn’t a live service game for say music rights for example people who bought it can still download it. I don’t understand why iTunes/qobuz isn’t the same, yes they can’t sell it again but you should still be able to access stuff you bought.
iTunes once got me because my library had some sort of breakdown and half of it disappeared and when I went to redownload some purchases I discovered the cd had been taken down for 5 seconds and then put back I no longer had any rights to it even though it was the same cd.
I’ve had that with iTunes several times - I think it’s nothing more than the catalogue changing and the same item somehow has a different catalogue number.
TV Shows were worse - you could buy a few individual seasons of something then they’d change to selling combined season 1 & 2, 3 & 4 etc so again the items were different even though you’d purchased individual seasons.
But you loose access to something you’ve already bought, not good.
Martin
Sounds like youve not bought it, just rented it. The simple answer is backup, but agree you shouldn’t have to.
Genuinely curious: what then is the benefit of subscribing to also download content from Qobuz if the net result is the same as streaming only, in terms of access to licensed content?
With downloaded content, you can still listen to it until the end of time (no matter what the licensing is), but you can’t re-download it if there is a licensing change that prohibits it.
To be honest, I’ve bought a few things and downloaded them straight away. It never even occurred to me until the recent changes, that I could download again.
In my mind it was like buying a CD, e.g. if I buy a CD, I get sent it and if I buy a download, I downloaded it. If I lost or damaged my CD, I wouldn’t expect to be able to go back and ask for a replacement copy. Therefore it never occurred to me that there would be an option to re-download something at a later date.
Quboz: never streamed, only purchased and downloaded.
No problems. 
Because it’s completely different. With a download, you have bought the file and personal rights to play the copyrighted material within your downloaded file perpetually.
With streaming, you don’t own anything, it’s like private radio, you subscribe to a service that allows you to stream content it has available at any time.
As far as downloaded files being available to re download after purchase, that was purely a convenience thing, however some distributors/copyright owners wanted to withdraw content from such a convenience service… withdraw the files from sale as it were.
But the file you own and possess is yours, and as such you need to take reasonable care to safeguard it. In the UK now you can legally backup your owned media files and not contravene copyright law.
It is worth noting however, you never own the music (unless you are the copyright owner), you specifically own the physical or logical media format the music is stored on; ie the LP, CD, download or tape. You have the permit to consume/listen to the content/music for personal use stored on that media perpetually.
Agree, in fact I have said this in earlier posts on the subject and even used the CD replacement analogy.
Streaming to me is paying for a service that allows me to play a piece of music, for personal not commercial purposes. If I want to be sure of being able to play it multiple times I either trust that the streaming service will still have it available or I purchase my own personal copy, physical or digital, noting that it is my responsibility to look after that copy and to only play it under the terms of the purchase. Explained eloquently by @Simon-in-Suffolk just above.
Might be worth looking back through old posts as I seem to recall many posts/discussions on pros and cons of physical ( including your own digital copy) v streaming.
I have to say that recently I’ve started to buy from Bandcamp and used the CD + digital download option. Costs a little more but I get a CD hard copy plus the HiRes file most artists are now offering. Belt n’ braces!
Upgraded my Qobuz subscription to Sublime on the basis I wanted to be able to listen to my favourite albums without the fear of them disappearing from the subscription library. I also like the idea of having my own copy available should the internet down etc.
Now if I’ve listened to a streamed album a couple of times and really like it and there’s a high res version I buy it. Like buying favourite vinyl, it’s nice to have something a little more permanent that the streaming option. I backup every album and only recently noticed the option to re-download from Qobuz… nice touch!
I’ll get my downloads from Bandcamp wherever possible, as the artists get for more money that way, and buying direct from artists’ websites is even better, though few off them.