You can’t rely on other people or organisations to hold onto your media forever, and it’s a tired but true maxim that the cloud is just someone else’s machine.
If you’ve spent your hard earned cash supporting independent artists through Bandcamp, a series of ownership changes and layoffs suggest that now might be the best time for audiophiles to download their audio files to secure offline storage.
And:
While we’re not saying that Bandcamp is going to disappear into nothing (MySpace is still around after all), we think it’s perhaps prudent to download your albums from Bandcamp and store them offline. You never know – that’s all we’re saying.
The Bandcamp UI isn’t really designed with massive downloads in mind, and there are a lot of boxes to tick.
Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to download all of your Bandcamp music using the excellent Batchcamp extension which is available as both a FireFox addon, or as a Google Chrome extension.