When I buy digitally, I tend to want lossless. Probably surprising nobody, Bandcamp's been my usual mainstay for this since they have great prices, consumer+band-friendly policies, and are just generally a pretty great storefront. Sometimes an album's not on Bandcamp, though, and I admit I'm also a bit worried about their long-term future after having been passed around recently (first being acquired by Epic Games, of all fucking places, and then dumped over to some song-licensing company). So I'm sometimes on the lookout for alternative storefronts, and being continually disappointed by how terrible most of them are. I assume that there's not some incredible place out there that I'm missing, but what I've found over the years:
(in no actual order)
1) prostudiomasters.com -- The one time I bought something here, they literally required you to use an app to download from the site. They have never heard of a zipfile, apparently. I'm on Linux, so running their Windows/Mac app is at best annoyingly complex, and at worst impossible. I had emailed their customer support and they were nice enough to provide an alternate direct download for the album I bought, but I haven't been back there since. Has that changed at all?
2) hdtracks.com -- Does *not* require an app to download, but when last I used them, their web downloader queues up each individual track separately. (Again, I guess zipfiles don't exist?) That process is, at least, automated via Javascript or whatever, but you're still stuck going through however many file-download dialogs to get things saved properly (I suppose if I had my browser set to just automatically download to a specific folder it'd be more streamlined, but to hell with that.)
3) Qobuz -- Again, no actual app required, but like hdtracks.com they don't know what a zipfile is, and require individual track downloads. Unlike hdtracks.com, that process isn't even automated, so you've gotta manually click through on each one.
4) 7digital -- Have not yet actually tried these folks. (Edit: Apparently they do download via zip, though, which would be nice! I guess the selection is not great, nowadays, though.)
Is there anywhere else out there for "general-purpose" downloads? I've had good luck with label-specific sites -- Warp's "bleep" storefront, for instance, is great -- but for just a general digital lossless music download site, all the options except Bandcamp just seem awful. I also kind of hate to bring money considerations into it, but I cannot shake the impression that prices on prostudiomasters/hdtracks/qobuz, at least, are way too high. For most albums on there I could practically buy the vinyl release for what they're charging, and could nearly always get the CD version for the price (assuming a CD release exists, anyway). I do understand that "enterprise-grade" storage is a lot more expensive than consumer-grade stuff, but disk space is not *that* expensive, and Bandcamp can somehow manage to keep prices reasonable. Even when I chip in extra money on Bandcamp, I'm still paying less than what these other places are asking for.
Anyway, I expect this thread will be more of a gripe than anything else, but if anyone does have some magical storefront I've never heard of (or if the ones up there have improved their download functionality since I'd last tried them), I'd love to hear about it.
(Edit: I suppose I should also clarify that personally, I only really care about CD-quality audio. 16bit @ 44.1kHz is good enough for me. I actually typically don't even want a 24/96 download... 96kHz in particular seems pretty ridiculous to me for my own hardware, at least.)