This is in addition to bandcamp, which AFAIK is unsurpassed in its awesomeness.
For less niche stuff, I’ve used 7 digital and Qobuz in the past; both have screwed me over by either making it very difficult to download my purchases, or else charging me for an entire album before revealing (in a light grey font on a white background) that 60% of the tracks can only be streamed but not downloaded due to rights issues. I don’t think amazon’s ever sold FLAC, and even if they did, I would never buy anything from them. And I’m not willing to use Spotify since it screws its artists over so badly.
So, with all those various conditions laid down, is there anything left that anyone would recommend? Getting CDs from the library and ripping them works too, but depending on the album, it can take so long for it to arrive through interlibrary loan that by the time I get it, I’ve moved on to other things!
I sympathize so hard. I actually wrote a post about this a few months ago. I gave up and switched to Tidal, I was tired of hunting for flacs online.
However, if you’re more willing to stick with it than I was:
Bandcamp seems to be less used now than it used to be, but is still the king. Qobuz (as you described) have been adding in roadblocks to purchasing albums more and more presumably to push people to streaming. 7digital is is kind of dead, I bought one older album from them and the download didn’t work.
On to stuff you didn’t mention:
If you like electronic music, Juno Download and Beatport have a solid catalog, but be prepared to pay a lot more than Qobuz or 7digital.
HDtracks is also expensive and I’ve never used it, but it’s been around forever.
Artist websites will sometimes, very rarely, maybe offer lossless downloads (example)
You can also check if you have any local record stores near you, they’ll usually have CDs as well. Some will even carry new releases.
Good luck.
Beatport, HDtracks, & Juno Download all look promising—they even have my relatively obscure 90s music!—thanks! 👍
Of the two that you’ve had dealings with, do they let you download all the album tracks at once, or do they force you to download them one by one, or else, even worse, to use some special proprietary downloader thingy?
EDIT: The other thing I didn’t like about 7digital was when they switched from their old payment system to PayPal; with all the various browser tweaks on FF I had in place, bouncing between the two sites to pay and then claim my purchase would frequently cause problems.
Qobuz used to allow downloading entire albums and then switched to only allowing track downloads unless you download some app they’re trying to push (which I never used).
7digital offers both album and track downloads, and looking at my account it seems that it’s the album download specifically that just doesn’t work. I can download tracks one at a time.