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Qobuz dropping rights to my favorites. A pox on their house.

 

So, I favorite something on Qobuz, come back a few months later and SHAZAM, it's gone. "The rights holders have not made this content available to listen." This seems to be a growing problem for me and I doubt I';m the only one. WTF?? To add insult to injury, I take a look at Amazon (to which I do not subscribe) and there it is.

Qobuz is the only paid service I use. Tidal has too much overlap to be worth it and I find MQA dubious anyway. Amazon's march towards world domination is troubling and I just plain don't like Apple stuff. But my partner uses AppleMusic (I think) and reports similar annoyances.

This leaves me both perplexed and annoyed. I've been slowly culling my CD's, LP's and server library with the assumption that streaming service libraries would grow, not shrink. It's also in keeping with my wish to release my attachments to mere things. I'm coming to feel that this may be a grave error - in the realm of music what we don't physically possess, be it CD, an LP, BR disk or a data file, we never really possessed at all. I'm not content to live off memories of how much I once enjoyed hearing something. I might want to hear it again! So, as far as web/streaming content goes I'm moving back to downloading stuff so it can't be arbitrarily taken away from me.

Anybody else mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore? Bah, humbug! And Happy New Year

 
 
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Showing 1 response by mwatsme

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mwatsme
183 posts
 

@kletter1mann The same culling happens on Amazon/Prime Music including the most expensive HD Family plan that I switched to from Tidal. And it can be very frustrating when tracks suddenly disappear from custom playlists. Not only that, but on AmazonMusic, they will also change-up the quality offering... Let's say you added the UHD (best sound quality version) to a playlist, then they change the SQ to HD - this causes the UHD version to become unavailable. So the only way to get it back is the search for it again and add it back to the playlist in the lower quality.

The other gripe I have with Amazon Music is when you buy the digital music, it is MP3 - unless you buy the physical CD and rip it when it arrives - thats lame.

My point is Amazon is no better than the rest in this regard - we might have thought the libraries would be ever-increasing, but this is not the case. Instead, they are ever changing, and without warning become unavailable or downgraded. I've seen tracks disappear, then return again a couple weeks later - but usually not.

@mspot has it right... use streaming services for discovery, then buy what you want to keep.

 

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