Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

I'll be sticking to spotify personally out of convenience, and the fact that I'm paying for a family plan but to be fair paying that money directly to the artists you like will be much more effective while not supporting platforms that pay them very little for their work.

If you want though, using spotify adblock has been quite effective in my experiance. That way you have the convenience and you don't pay spotify shit

I buy music on bandcamp/directly from artists all the time. I just dislike streaming services, as I always want to have the files, and the money artists get from them is abbyssmal anyway.

Where can you legitimately buy music these days? I'll be happy to pay if the artist gets their fair share. I used to buy from Amazon but that has gone completely to shit recently. Like they really don't want you to buy stuff from them any more. And I cannot bring myself to give a cent to Spotify when they paid 100 million to Joe fucking Rogan.

If you aren’t going to shows and buying from the merch table, or buying directly from bancamp etc you aren’t supporting artists.That’s where the majority of their money comes from.

Yep. That's why I pay Spotify but stopped paying netflix. Fuck this need to subscribe to countless streaming services.

Not even old music.

Architecture In Helsinki is missing the third album on Spotify. There are plenty more, but that's always the first that pops in my head whenever I'm listening to Indie playlists, Of Montréal comes on and I realise I haven't heard Places Like This in a long time. Then I remember why, and I either have to dig through my old CD collection or download it.

Or if you live outside of America, the number of albums that don't let you play some of the songs is insane.

Just as the other user said, using YouTube Audio for this stuff is the way to go.

Just look for <Artist Name> - Topic channels and check the playlists (not the uploads). You should find full albums uploaded directly by copyright holders. Use a VPN if you don't find anything. Sometimes stuff from your region will not be available in your region, but available if you appear to be somewhere else ;)

Also, if we are going old style P2P, and not using torrents for some reason (RuTracker deserves a special mention), then DC++ should come before SoulseekQT/Nicotine+ anyway.

Mostly lossless grabs from torrents + YouTube Audio (edit: using yt-dlp), and you have a selection with guaranteed high quality*. Definitely better than whatever scattered MP3s in SoulseekQT/Nicotine+

* Opus@150kbits/s is transparent, except for some killer samples heard by a trained ear.

Tbh, why pirate music when I can listen to a new album within 5 seconds of its release? I don't have to wait for downloads, don't have to deal with mistaken metadata, I don't have to worry about physical storage sizes.

I fully support piracy for basically everything, but we should count ourselves lucky that music streaming went the way it did and not the way movie and series streaming has gone.

Yeah fuck those traders and scammers. Soulseek isn't created for that shit.

Bandcamp is an excellent option, I often try to get releases from their when possible.

I do when I can afford to, but you can't really buy every song you listen to, can you?

I absolutely do where I can but when a lot of stuff gets released within the scene I am into on a dead inferior format (vinyl) exclusively then I am absolutely going to pirate that shit if I can.

You don't get high quality mp3s from that.

I mostly listen to jazz, blues and classical. I use rutracker which has everything I want and in lossless formats. Mp3s too but I'm more interested in lossless.

I guess that will do if the kind of music you listen to doesn't need to be high quality.