2. digital
  3. 181757-72868

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

 
 
128x128kletter1mann

Showing 1 response by tonywinga

tonywinga's avatar
tonywinga
844 posts
 

My brother was an engineer at the Sony CD plant.  I got a tour from him back in the early 90s.  Fascinating.  He told me CDs have a min design life of 15 years.  They are not considered archival.  The polycarbonate discs have the pits molded in them.  That’s the music information.  The next step is sputtering a layer of Aluminum just a few atoms thick onto the disc.  A clear coating is added to protect the Aluminum and the label printed on.  I could imagine that a disc could be restored if the Aluminum coating could be removed without damaging the surface of the polycarbonate disc and reapplying the Aluminum coating.  It would have to be a very valuable disc to go to all that trouble.

Just for fun that day, I brought home an uncoated disc.  It was simply a clear CD with the pits molded into it.  I tried it in my CD player.  It would not play.  No surprise, just curious.

More to discover