No, making an album private does not disappear the music from people who have purchased it.

However, Bandcamp does abide by the laws that require them to stop distributing music at the rights holders' request.

No music service, or any service, for that matter, will guarantee access to files without regard to laws. Some will try harder, some have tried harder and been beaten down.

this has happened to me once, appropriately enough with some hauntology tracks. the songs are weirdly enough still available in the ios app to play but not to download via the web. presumably they're still somewhere in bandcamp behind a boolean, but i never got around to downloading them (to be fair, i have them on a _cassette_ that originally included bandcamp codes, so i mean, i really can't complain, i knew what i was getting into)

This happened to me a bunch. I think in one case an artist released an album, but wanted to disallow buying individual tracks so they relisted it after I bought one track.

The most infuriating thing is that bandcamp gaslights you on it. I eventually confirmed that yes, I had bought that song, after tracking down the receipt in my email provider or something (it was hidden from purchase history, bandcamp "I can't find my music" link didn't mention this, etc etc).

This isn't just an issue for playing music though - if you buy a bunch of stuff but don't download it right away you could loose it too. I bought the track I mentioned right after it was released, and the substitution happened within a day or two of that.

Like, I get it, if there was some legal issue (pirated work - and then they should issue refunds). But the fact that bandcamp tries to hide it just means that they know they have no moral grounds here.