I would pay money for original media because the data will likely be in it's "best" original encoding, metadata etc. And nobody other than the studio has meddle

I would pay money for original media because the data will likely be in it's "best" original encoding, metadata etc. And nobody other than the studio has meddled with it. You don't get that using youtube-dl or torrenting formats other people provide. edit: Music production evolves over time and digital content distribution is very different in the mixing business. Older formats are not built with streaming in mind and so you lose a lot of quality during upload to streaming services: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHxMsawJsTc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHxMsawJsTc