Such sad and terrible state of buying classical albums in online.

1. Lack of / low quality artworks, liner notes
Say, go hdtracks, and see 'about his album'... There are too many "LINER NOTES ARE NOT AVAILABLE" disclaimers. on $25+ downloads.
Of course, many of so called 'HIGH RESOLUTION COVER ART' are mere 600x600.... All I want is not clean, not-badly-compressed 1000x1000 cover art, but it seems it's just a dream at this point.
Not to mention pretty much everything released before 2000s are either 250x250 or do not have digitized album art. Among others, Naxos actually tries to solve this problem by scanning liner notes on old albums... but they are all unedited (full of dusts and imperfections) and look very unprofessional.

2. Un-standardization of metadata itself.
For example, about composer's name. Some labels but "FirstName LastName". Others use "LastName, FirstName" which uses comma. Some labels just put Lastname in all capital letters. A single composer is called in at least more than 5 ways (i.e Handel) which completely messes up metadata and confuses media software.
Some labels love to put a name of composer in "artist' tab, which conflicts with performers.
Same goes for names of performers, conductors, orchestra name and stuffs. No other labels use same system.

3. Terrible, out-of-date services.
For some reason, everyone in classical scene hates an idea of unified storefront. So everyone has their own little stores. Download limits/expiration, non-functional download manager are what I usually encounter. Before a recent update, Naxos's Classicalonline HD LL uses a store DRM called Orastream to prevent illegal downloads within the site and act as a download manager. It screwed up my computer everything I tried to use. And of course these download managers no longer work on Chrome and Microsoft Edge, making a lot of sites which do not provide manual download nonfunctional.

With exception of BIS Records which runs eclassical (the best classical music download site ever), I pretty much stopped buying albums online and turned to buying a used CDs on Amazon. At least I could scan the album covers myself and clean them to my own standard. I wonder how others are buying albums (if not just streaming) these days.

Labels complaining about their album value getting lowered.... With problems I witness, I am not so surprised.

 

I find streaming to be much easier, however I am lucky to live where there is very fast internet and 4G mobile with unlimited data. I use qobuz and find their classical (and jazz) collection to be very good. Makes for easy comparison of different interpretations and performances of different pieces to find the one you like. I am surprised often that sometimes it's not only about finding the right piece, but also the right interpretation and performance that is essential for me to really get into a piece. For me Qobuz makes this easy. New releases are added very often. Almost all booklets are there also (not sure about the pixels count though. I mostly peruse on my Ipad or phone, read the booklet, then press play and forget).

The bad....Sometimes, recordings disappear from the catalogue. So when you have favourited them and go back to listen again months later they are not there anymore. It doesn't happen often. But I thought I would let everyone know that it does happen. So CD or Download has it's advantages there.

 

Been buying cds because a lot of labels have great liner notes.

 

It's a bummer for sure. I just go with CD rips and scans of liner notes. eClassical is the one online store that seems to be consistently great. I have a lot of respect for BIS and how they do things. You can also download digital versions of their covers and liner notes without even purchasing.

 

Sometimes the liner notes have great pieces about music. Then you read about something new while listening to the music and you realise that enjoyment and learning can go together. For special recordings I tend to expect liner notes.

 

I buy lots of used Amazon cd's too due to the great value. I spent a childhood reading liner notes, if I had more time these days I would but mostly I just ignore them so kind of could care less about the artwork.

Seconded about metadata - it's all over the place. I don't really rely on metadata except for composer info, I have most of my music arranged in directories according to composer. However I will have to change it myself for CD's i've ripped because it's so inconsistent that's it's missing composer info!