I recently went back into my Bleep catalog and wanted to download some music only to find that quite a few of my downloads were not working. So I reached out to support and today I got a response, which I'll post here:
Thank you for reaching out to us, we're sorry you're not able to download your release.
We aim to keep all purchases available for download from the music section of your account, and this is possible for the majority of releases on Bleep. However, we are unable to guarantee this service in certain cases where releases have to be taken down due to requests by the label or distributor or changes in licensing agreements.
We understand how frustrating this can be, and we would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused. We always recommend downloading music at the time of purchase and backing up your library to avoid any future issues.
We'd love to keep the download active, however the availability of the download is outside of our control, and we apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.
Some of the affected music are albums from Boards of Canad (Hi Scores) as well as some Jega albums, etc. For Hi Scores in particular, I noticed that Bleep is still selling it on their page. I guess some licensing/contract deals changed and they had to remove the previous version they sold.
Now, I'm a big BoC fan and have purchased a lot of their music (digital, physical) as well as merch but I'm not inclined to re-buy anything just on the off-chance that it might get removed again. Not to mention that so much music is now freely available on YouTube and through other avenues that it makes even less sense.
Anyway, even though I understand Bleep's reasoning, it still leaves me kind of annoyed. At the very least, it would be nice to be informed in some way if purchases are about to be deactivated so people have a chance to re-download and archive, if needed.
Oh well... what can you do...
