Comment by naturalmovement
3 days ago
Not limited to PlayStation. Apple's been doing this for years.
I have iTunes music going back to the day the store opened. Some of it is now missing from the iTunes cloud (or Apple Music or whatever it's called this week). It would be gone forever had I not made a local backup.
At least Sony's contacting customers. I was looking for songs I knew I had and couldn't find them until I searched a local backup.
When I complained, I got a boilerplate "tough titties, sometimes we lose licensing" response.
Always keep hard copies people.
This foolishness of trusting someone else to host your stuff for you? Well now you know.
I wonder why their license affects your local copy of a purchased product.
Imagine a supermarket losing the contract to sell Nescafé, so Nestlé comes into your house to take their coffee. Okay, Nestlé would totally do this anyway, but it’s bizarre.
As described, the Apple version is that they won't remove local copies you already have? They just can't facilitate copying a new instance to your device.
I still think this is crazy, mind.
Because it's not a purchased product. It's a sub-license of Apple's license for you to temporarily play a work.
Yes but this is not how it’s marketed. The button says purchase not license/Rent for a random period of time.
With Apple, you can at least download the media you bought and keep it.
Could you do that with these PlayStation store movies?
I have a smart playlist that gets automatically populated with songs in my library that are not available (evidently pulled) on Apple Music anymore, and it is growing with tunes that I like and that are sometimes impossible to find elsewhere. If I had the foresight to get actual copies, I could still listen to them. I don’t think there’s any way to download them, but I didn’t “buy” them via iTunes Store, just streamed them.
Right, I meant songs you’ve purchased.
If I download it on my iPad I’m pretty sure it will delete itself or eventually got deleted on an update. I might be wrong but this is how these systems work.
If you buy it on a PC, you get a file you can do whatever you want with. In Apple's case it's at least possible to keep if you're vigilant.
I'm sure the file disappearing from your iOS device is naught more than a convenient bug. It's not ideal, but I don't think one can realistically expect much more (at least not without actual consumer protection, which will probably take a while).
Sony and Apple aren’t the only offenders. Google Play Music did something similar 12 years ago or so. It’s been a bit but I recall permanently losing access to a lot of music I owned at the time.
I don't remember that happening. What I do remember is that Alphabet decided to axe Google Play Music, but they announced that months in advance and made it fairly easy to download my entire collection. Which is why I now have a couple hundred gigabytes of music backed up on several devices.