Your own digital music archive: independent of streaming subscriptions

Why an archive of your own?

A streaming subscription is a rental agreement. You pay every month for access to a catalogue that someone else curates and can change at any time. As long as everything works, you don't notice. But there are some very concrete reasons not to rely on it alone.

Prices go up

Spotify raised its US Premium Individual price to $12.99 a month in early 2026, its third increase since 2023. In Germany the same plan went from €10.99 to €12.99 in 2025, and Apple Music there went up from €10.99 to €11.99 in July 2026, citing higher licensing costs. None of this is scandalous; these are ordinary business decisions. But they show that the price of access to your music isn't in your hands. Over ten years, an individual plan adds up to around $1,500, and afterwards you own nothing.

Music disappears

Anyone who has streamed for a while knows greyed-out tracks in old playlists. Licences expire, rights change hands, labels and services fall out over terms. Sometimes artists pull their music themselves: Neil Young had his catalogue removed from Spotify in January 2022 and only returned in 2024. In early 2024 Universal Music pulled its catalogue from TikTok for several months over a licensing dispute. And there are quieter cases: an album gets replaced by a remaster, a censored version replaces the original, a regional release isn't available in your country.

Services shut down

Google Play Music had a large user base and was still shut down in 2020. Anyone who had only streamed there could move playlists to YouTube Music, and that was it. Formats die too: MQA was marketed for years as the future of hi-res streaming, until the company went into administration in 2023 and Tidal replaced every MQA title with FLAC in 2024. Offline downloads in apps like Spotify or Apple Music are encrypted and only work while your subscription is active.

You decide what and how you listen

An archive gives you the version you want: the original master instead of the louder remaster, the live recording that never made it into a streaming catalogue, the audio drama from your childhood. It works on a plane, in a dead zone and abroad without a data plan. It collects no listening data. And it works with any player, because the files belong to you, not to an app.

What "owning" means for digital music

Not every purchase is ownership in a practical sense. Three properties make the difference:

• No copy protection (DRM). The file can be copied, backed up and played in any player, with no account and no licence server.
• An open, widespread format. FLAC, ALAC, MP3, AAC and Opus are documented and supported by countless programs. A proprietary format ties you to one vendor.
• A local file. Music that only lives in a provider's cloud is yours only as long as that provider exists and lets you.

Legally, buying a download gets you a licence to use the music rather than ownership of it. In practice, though, that makes all the difference: nobody can take a DRM-free file on your drive away from you after the fact.

Where the music comes from

Buying DRM-free downloads

Bandcamp deserves its own paragraph because its model is particularly fair to artists. Bandcamp keeps 15 percent of digital sales, 10 percent once an artist passes $5,000 in sales, plus payment processing fees of typically 4 to 6 percent. According to Bandcamp, an average of 82 percent of the price goes to artists and labels. Many releases have a minimum price that you can choose to exceed. And you can re-download purchased albums in another format at any time.

Copy-protected, and therefore unsuitable for an archive, are the offline downloads in streaming apps (Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Amazon Music Unlimited and others). They only play in that app and vanish with the subscription.

Ripping CDs

The CD is the underrated archival medium: lossless at 16-bit/44.1 kHz, almost always without copy protection, and often available second-hand for a few dollars. A careful rip is a bit-exact copy, equivalent to a CD-quality FLAC download.

For a clean result you need a program that detects read errors and verifies the copy against a database. The best known is AccurateRip, which collects checksums of rips of the same CD from around the world. If your checksum matches others, your rip is error-free.

• Mac: XLD (free) rips to FLAC or ALAC and verifies against AccurateRip.
• Windows: Exact Audio Copy (free) is the classic; dBpoweramp (paid) is the comfortable alternative.
• Linux: whipper or cyanrip, both free with AccurateRip verification.

How to set up these programs and read a rip log is covered in ripping CDs: how to make a bit-perfect copy.

The legal side depends on where you live. In Germany, section 53 of the Copyright Act permits individual copies for private use, as long as no effective copy protection is circumvented. In the UK, a private copying exception introduced in 2014 was quashed by the High Court in 2015, so format-shifting your own CDs is not expressly permitted there. In the US, there is no explicit statute for ripping your own CDs; personal format-shifting is widely regarded as fair use, but no court has settled it. Check your local rules, and in any case don't sell or share the copies.

What you already have

Many people have more than they think: old MP3 folders on a drive, an iTunes library from years ago, purchased downloads in accounts at various stores. A good first step is to gather everything in one place, resolve duplicates, and re-download from store accounts whatever is still available. How to organise it is covered in organising a music library.

The right format for an archive

For an archive meant to last decades: lossless, open and well documented. The first choice is FLAC. It's royalty-free, in use since 2001, supported by almost all software, and officially specified since December 2024 as RFC 9639. Even if no player could play it directly one day, it could always be decoded from the specification. The transfer guidance of the US National Archives (NARA) lists FLAC alongside Broadcast WAV among its preferred formats for digital audio.

ALAC is equally lossless and open source since 2011, more convenient in Apple's world, a little less common outside it. Because both are lossless, you can always convert without loss, so the choice isn't final.

Purchased MP3 and AAC files stay in the archive as they are. Converting them to FLAC gains nothing, and another lossy encode would cost quality. Why is explained in music file formats explained.

Order is part of the format: tags in the files, embedded artwork, a clear folder structure and playlists as open files (such as .m3u8). Then your archive isn't tied to one program but is complete again in any player.

Backing up: the 3-2-1 rule

An archive on a single drive is a bet on that drive. The cloud storage provider Backblaze has published failure statistics for its data centres for years. In 2025, 1.36 percent of its hard drives failed over the year. That sounds small, but it means that over five to ten years the failure of a single drive is anything but unlikely. Add theft, water damage, accidental deletion and malware.

The proven answer is the 3-2-1 rule:

• 3 copies of your music: the original and two backups.
• 2 different storage media, for example the computer's internal SSD and an external hard drive.
• 1 copy off-site: a drive at a friend's or relative's place, at the office, or encrypted cloud storage.

Two practical notes: RAID or a mirrored NAS protects against one drive failing, but not against accidental deletion or ransomware. And SSDs store data electrically. The industry standard JEDEC JESD218 requires consumer SSDs at the end of their rated life to retain data for only one year unpowered at 30 °C. Plugging in an SSD from the drawer now and then does no harm.

Checking that files are still intact

Rare but possible: a file gets corrupted without anyone noticing, and the damaged version propagates into every backup. Verification helps. FLAC has a built-in advantage here: every file contains an MD5 checksum of its audio data. With the command-line tool flac you can test an entire collection:

flac -t -s *.flac

If it reports no errors, the audio data is intact. Programs like foobar2000 offer the same with a graphical interface. Run it once a year, especially before replacing an old backup with a new one.

Using the archive every day

An archive is there to be heard, not just stored. The typical setup:

• At home: the archive lives on the computer or NAS. A player that adds folders directly plays it without copying. Luma for Mac does exactly that.
• On the go: the phone gets the archive itself or a smaller AAC copy. Luma Transfer sends it from the Mac over Wi-Fi or cable straight into Luma on the iPhone, with no cloud, and only what's missing.
• New additions: purchased downloads and fresh rips land in the archive first, get tagged and backed up, and only then get distributed.

Luma is built for exactly this setup: a player for your own files on iPhone, iPad and Mac, offline, with no account and no tracking. The library can be exported at any time as a plain folder with the original files, artwork and playlists, so you're never tied to an app, Luma included. More in the help center under Export and backup.

Combining streaming and an archive

An archive of your own doesn't mean giving up streaming entirely. For discovering new music, for radio-style listening and for a quick mood, a catalogue of tens of millions of tracks is hard to beat. Many people do well with a mix:

• Stream to discover, buy what you play again and again. If you listen to an album all the way through for the third time, you'll probably want to keep it.
• Save your favourite playlists, at least as a list of titles, artists and albums, so you can rebuild them from your own archive later. Luma can read such a list in the format of its playlist backup and matches the songs to your archive by their tags.
• Set a budget. Buying two or three albums a month instead of a subscription leaves you after a few years with a collection of several hundred albums that stays.

How to get started

• Pick a home for the archive, such as a "Music" folder on your computer or an external drive.
• Gather everything you have there: old MP3s, your iTunes library, purchased downloads.
• Write down the ten albums you listen to most and buy them as FLAC or rip them from CD.
• Clean up tags and artwork, at least album artist and album title.
• Make a first backup on an external drive, and a second one off-site.
• Connect the archive to a player that respects folders and files, and put it on your phone.

Frequently asked questions

Am I allowed to rip my CDs?

It depends on the country. Germany allows individual private copies as long as no effective copy protection is circumvented. In the UK, the private copying exception was quashed in 2015. In the US there's no explicit statute, though personal format-shifting is widely seen as fair use. In every case, copies must not be sold or shared.

Can I save songs from Spotify or Apple Music for my archive?

No. Offline downloads in streaming apps are encrypted, only play in that app and only while the subscription is active. An archive needs DRM-free files, such as purchases from Bandcamp, Qobuz or the iTunes Store, or your own CD rips.

What's the best format for a music archive?

FLAC: lossless, royalty-free, openly specified and supported by almost all software. ALAC is an equivalent alternative in Apple's world. MP3 or AAC files you've already bought are best kept unchanged.

How do I back up my music collection properly?

Follow the 3-2-1 rule: three copies on two different storage media, one of them off-site. Also check now and then that files can be restored from the backup, and verify FLAC files with their built-in checksum.

Is a collection of my own more expensive than streaming?

In the short term yes, in the long term not necessarily. An individual plan costs around $13 a month in the US, about $156 a year. That buys 15 to 20 albums a year that stay yours. Used CDs are often cheaper still.

Sources

• Spotify raises US prices to $12.99, its third increase in three years (TechRadar, January 2026). techradar.com
• Apple Music price increase in Germany, July 2026 (Macerkopf, German). macerkopf.de/2026/07/18/apple-music-in-deutschland-ab-sofort-teurer
• Bandcamp Help: What are Bandcamp's fees? get.bandcamp.help/hc/en-us/articles/23020665520663
• Bandcamp for Artists (82 percent on average). bandcamp.com/artists
• German Copyright Act, section 53, reproduction for private use. gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_urhg
• High Court quashes the UK private copying exception, July 2015 (IPcopy). ipcopy.blog/2015/07/21/high-court-quashes-private-copying-exception
• National Archives (NARA): Transfer Guidance Tables, digital audio section (draft, 2013). records-express.blogs.archives.gov (PDF)
• Backblaze Drive Stats for 2025. backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-2025
• IETF: RFC 9639, Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC). rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9639.html
• Tidal replaces MQA with FLAC, 2024 (Headphonesty). headphonesty.com/2024/06/tidal-officially-dumps-mqa

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