ruby

any media that requires a permission from an external party to play can and will eventually be taken from you. at least qobuz seems to be drm-free (i don’t use the service, so don’t quote me on that) so you should be able to make a copy of what you listen to. at least before they enshittify.

still, i’d personally not feel comfortable entrusting a streaming service with being the gatekeeper of the media i want long-term access to.

technically it can, but not for free. if you have a subscription to access the media, the site is supported and drm-free, and you have a way to pass the account credentials to yt-dlp, it will download. if it plays inside a browser with drm disabled, yt-dlp can likely get it for you. you could download stuff from crunchyroll that way before they added drm. if it does have drm, you can still download the encrypted stream and decrypt it later with something like gpac if you have the keys, but that’s a bit besides the point.

however there’s very little supported sites now that have paid subscriptions and no drm. and in neither case is yt-dlp circumventing anything, it cannot access something you had no access to in the first place.