Everyone loves a good Criterion Collection or Shout Factory release. But what’s a good website from which to buy digital media? Do you buy digital media? Or do you just buy physical and rip? Or do you just sail the seas?
Games seem to be itch.io or Steam, maybe a Humble Bundle or Epic/GOG exclusive here and there. But what about movies and music? What about books and audiobooks?
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For music I pretty much only buy from Bandcamp and usually wait for the monthly Bandcamp Friday where the site waives their cut so therefore the artist themselves get more money from the sale.
The app (which was never good) is getting worse and the company as a whole was recently sold off so I’m expecting it to slowly get worse and worse but it is still the best place for me to go in terms of my musical tastes.
Came to say this. Also of note, digital purchases on Bamdcamp are downloadable as DRM-free, lossless FLAC files which is awesome.
Yup! And to add to that further I can go back and download my purchases again, whenever I want in a different format if I wish.
Beatport you have to petition their support team to “allow” you to download any of your purchases for a second time.
Juno you buy it in one format, often paying more for a flac or a wav file.
Fuck both of those latter business models.
I feel kind of shitty about it, but I use Audible for my audiobooks. They might be mediocre for authors, but you can’t beat the ceiling their credit system puts on the cost per book, and I buy too many to afford anything else.
(Check your library with hoopla or Libby if you’re in the US, though. Odds are there’s a lot available.)
I used to use Scribd/Everand as an extra library of books, but they’ve switched to a credit system where you get credits a month to “own”, but only while you have an active subscription, so fuck them.
You should check out libro.fm. They do the monthly credit like audible, but their downloads are DRM free and you can pick a local bookstore that they will contribute to.
That does seem reasonable, especially for most who don’t buy as many books as I do.
It would add up to a decent amount more money for me personally as often as I buy bulk credits, though.
I just think we’ve let the mega corps like Amazon undercut every aspect of our lives. I’d rather give money to my locally owned bookstore than fund another spaceship for billionaires.
I definitely won’t criticize. It seems like a reasonable option for a lot of people.
From my perspective, if I had an unlimited budget I’d be buying hundreds of books a year. I don’t do that for obvious reasons, but 20% less books to support a smaller business is a pretty big sacrifice.
That’s what led me to this. I quit Audible a few months back, planning to just buy more media outright. But they offered me a “come back and pay $0.99 for the first three months!” and I’m not really saying “no” to basically giving them Amazon’s money. (Though for the holidays they’ve apparently upped the offer to that plus a $20 credit.) So I thought this would be a good general question as I look for more ways to support creators directly, after taking their money runs out.
Good mention of Libby, too. A coworker recommended that to me, so I’ve got it now as well. Sadly my local selection isn’t great for audiobooks. But it does make me want to get an ereader more.
Bandcamp looks to be a good way to buy music though, as someone mentioned. But I can’t find any good way to buy digital copies of movies/TV. It’s all pretty platform locked, it seems.
I’ve only done a small handful of my library, but you can rip your books from Audible.
I don’t really like any of the ways to manage them though.
Fun tip for audible, you can basically do that cancel trick forever.
Agree wholeheartedly on all points. Plus I wish their player was better, but I can work around that through aax2mp3 and use my preferred player.
Games I try to get from GOG over Steam for them being DRM free, everything else I pirate or stream.
I pirate movies if they’re not on streaming services I have access to via sharing someone’s password, I use Spotify for music, and I go to the library for books and audiobooks.
Give me shit for using Spotify; IDC. It’s literally the most convenient way of listening to music. If it was easier to find and download it via piracy, I would just do that.
Yeah, I feel like I’m pretty entrenched into Spotify. It works with just about any device I might try to connect to. Plus discovery is made fairly simple, even if it is driven largely by opaque algorithms.
They keep raising the rates though, and the artists aren’t making any more as a result, so I’m keeping an eye out for alternatives
For music: bandcamp. No DRM, has a big artist library; and artists take most of the profit; so they put up quite a large library there.
Steam and gog.
I don’t really need to buy games, I already have those I want. But if possible I buy them directly from the company that made them and avoid middlemen. Piracy for Movies, TV and music.
Movies it’s the cinema and Netflix, piracy for everything else as few services serve my country/region. Games are Steam and HB, music is Spotify (sub is cheap, $3), generally don’t need to pirate games or music.
