I mean, if you are into Metal, https://en.metal-tracker.com/ and an airsonic server will get you pretty far. anarcho-punk.net can help suppliment that. If you like other forms of music, it can be harder. I often have to resort to using a downloader to get files from youtube. Sometimes you can find things on the postman tracker using i2p. The current state of torrenting is pretty much shit compared to what it used to be, but that is because most people settled for spotify. If you value quality music, from quality artists, you should pay them for their work. If that means buying a record or a tape from somebody, then you should consider investing in that sort of media. If it means downloading, you can always look on bandcamp or the many alternatives that now exist both on and off the fediverse (bandwagon is a cool new fediverse option). There are a lot of great bands just giving away their music online. Maybe consider sometimes paying them for what they do if you are like me and you can't afford to always pay everybody all the time. Spotify makes things cheap and easy and thats why you are getting massive amounts of AI slop music being uploaded now. It just isn't worth it as a real musician to put your music on there anymore. So until we as music lovers decide that it's worth supporting artists in some new way, things are only going to get worse and we are going to have to put up with a lot of shitty platforms making shitty choices for shitty reasons. The first step is having this realization that spotify and youtube are shitty... not just to artists but to users. But if you want to really be able to enjoy music again, it probably involves finding a way to directly pay artists for their work while cutting out as many middlemen as possible. I highly suggest building a library of your own. It isn't the cheapest thing in the world. You might have to buy a few hard drives to make sure things are backed-up, maybe a raspberry pi to run it all on and depending on how technical you are, you might have to learn some new skills in order to run it all, but with that setup running an airsonic server and the subsonic app on your phone, you can listen to your own music(and podcast) collection from anywhere. It's worth the effort in my opinion. You could even run airsonic as a tor hidden service if you want (then you don't have to even punch any holes in your routers firewall).