For musicians who are on Bandcamp you can buy a CD and get a FLAC download. (Ofc there's no telling what happens to your access when Bandcamp folds, so that sort of defeats the point.)
I use this[1] for making sure I have everything I've purchased from Bandcamp downloaded to my NAS. Even made a bash alias to wrap it so I just type `bandcamp` after I've purchased something and it downloads and sorts it immediately.
Well, if you're afraid of Bandcamp folding, you'd better download the FLACs right now. That's the advantage when you compare it to MoviesAnywhere - there's no way to get a DRM-free downloadable version of the video material you bought...
Don't (just) be afraid of Bandcamp folding - be afraid of artists folding. Some years ago I purchased a few tracks by an artist on Bandcamp, downloaded them as Ogg Vorbis - and now, almost ten years later, I wanted to re-download them as FLAC for archival, but the artist has completely shut down their Bandcamp page. It's a bit of an extraordinary case but serves as a good reminder to download in the highest-possible quality at the earliest possible point in time. It doesn't help that it was a really niche artist and there are no warez copies of his tracks, at least not in the open web.
> Don't (just) be afraid of Bandcamp folding - be afraid of artists folding.
I've recently come across that problem at least twice – I learned about a potentially interesting album done by somebody, but it had already disappeared from Bandcamp without so much of trace. In one case it turned out I had missed the album by only two months, because the album page still appeared in Google's search index cache with a corresponding last indexed-date, but of course that's not much use as far as getting the actual music is concerned.
Is the Wayback Machine even able to save the preview streams? Trying it for some other artists that are still live on Bandcamp this doesn't seem to be the case, and in any case it certainly wasn't the case for the particular album I was looking for.
Ultimately, unlike the OP I luckily found at least the one album I was most interested in "elsewhere", though it's still a bit of a shame that it's no longer regularly available and it'd absolutely would have merited paying for it.
I have a similar story, about a band that apparently only ever appeared live as an opening act for another pretty niche band called Texas (they had a few hits in the nineties) five years ago and has since been inactive - https://www.facebook.com/hightre. I liked them and fortunately bought a CD at the souvenir stand at the end of the concert - to my knowledge the music is not available anywhere else, in any form...
It was by a guy called Dombrovski. I started digging, trying to see if I can track him down in other ways and ask him for a copy, but then I wish I hadn't done that because I dug up quite some dirt... (seems like he was sort of a con man, his website dombrovski.com now just redirects to a court case, which makes me think that his domain was seized and maybe also his other sources of income such as his bandcamp account)
