How to buy music directly from artists and actually own it
The files are yours forever. They play anywhere. They work regardless of whether any company or software exists or not.
THE SIMPLE RULE: IF YOU’RE NOT SURE, CHOOSE MP3 320. It plays on everything, the files are a reasonable size, and the quality is excellent.
Format details:
MP3 320 — High quality, small files, universal compatibility. The sensible default.
MP3 V0 — Slightly smaller files than 320, essentially indistinguishable in quality. Fine if storage space is tight.
FLAC — Lossless. Mathematically identical to the original recording, larger files. Use this if you care about audio quality and want a permanent archive. Plays in Foobar2000, VLC, and most Android music apps natively. Does not play in Apple’s Music app without conversion to ALAC.
ALAC — Apple’s lossless format. Same audio quality as FLAC, but plays natively in the Apple Music app and syncs to iPhones without fuss. The lossless choice if you’re on Mac and iPhone.
WAV and AIFF — Uncompressed, very large files, no quality advantage over FLAC or ALAC for listening purposes. Skip these unless you’re doing audio production work.
AAC and Ogg Vorbis — Compressed like MP3. Fine, but MP3 320 has broader compatibility, so there’s rarely a reason to choose these over it.
After purchase, Bandcamp emails you a receipt with a download link. You can also re-download at any time from your Bandcamp collection page (bandcamp.com/collection when logged in).
The download arrives as a ZIP file. Unzip it before you try to play anything.
Mac: Double-click the ZIP file. A folder appears next to it. Done.
Windows: Right-click the ZIP file, select “Extract All,” choose a location, click Extract. Done.
Your computer doesn’t care how you organise your music files. You can dump everything into one folder, sort it meticulously by artist and year, or anything in between. File organisation is for you, not the machine — do whatever makes it easy to find things. That’s between you and your computer, but your music player will use the metadata inside the music files to organise and display them.
One thing worth doing: keep a copy of your files somewhere other than a single hard drive. Hard drives fail, computers get stolen, houses flood. An external drive, a second computer, or cloud storage all reduce the risk. Any backup is better than none.
Good music players for Android: Poweramp (paid, excellent), foobar2000 (free), VLC (free, plays everything).
If you’d rather not use a cable, copy files wirelessly via Google Drive, Dropbox, or LocalSend (free, open source — transfers directly between devices on the same Wi-Fi without going through any server).
iOS is more restrictive about files than Android, but there are two workable routes.
Route A — Apple Music sync:
Works natively with MP3, AAC, and ALAC. If you have FLAC files and want to use this route, convert them to ALAC first using fre:ac (free, Windows and Mac, freac.org).
Route B — Third-party player app:
Works on any computer, handles any format, no conversion needed.
Evermusic can also pull files directly from Google Drive, iCloud Drive, or Dropbox if you’d rather skip the cable entirely.
Bandcamp’s own help page for downloading and playing files on mobile is at get.bandcamp.help — worth checking if any of these steps have changed.
Streaming made people forget that a computer with speakers is a perfectly good hi-fi. You don’t need a phone in the picture at all.
Windows: Foobar2000 (free) — lightweight, handles every format, highly customisable. Go to File → Preferences → Media Library, add your music folder, done.
Mac: Swinsian ($20, one-time) — clean, fast, looks like the old iTunes without the streaming clutter. Handles FLAC natively, unlike Apple’s Music app.
Both: VLC (free) — plays anything without complaint.
From your computer you can connect to whatever you have — Bluetooth speaker, soundbar, smart speaker, receiver. All of it works fine. If your computer has a 3.5mm headphone jack, you can also run a cable directly into a stereo amplifier and a pair of speakers, which will sound considerably better than any Bluetooth or smart speaker you own, and will require no internet connection, no subscription, no firmware update, and no cooperation from any corporation whatsoever. Just a thought.
Spotify Premium has a ‘download’ feature for ‘offline listening’. This is not the same as owning files. Spotify’s downloaded tracks are encrypted with DRM (digital rights management) and stored in a proprietary format that can only be read by the Spotify app — they are not accessible as audio files on your device. The app requires an internet connection at least once every 30 days to reauthorise your downloaded content; without it, the tracks become unplayable. If your subscription ends, every downloaded track is immediately inaccessible. You cannot transfer the files to another app outside Spotify, or keep them after leaving Spotify.