As I kid I would record songs off the radio, and I would copy songs off other cassettes I liked. I did the same when cd's became a thing and then when internet went to cable/dsl from dial up, that's when I started downloading shit like it was my job.

Lidarr also supports Usenet

Pretty much only pirate when something isn't on QoBuz.

I personally don't see a reason to torrent music when a simple download of a flac or something from yt if I can't find it anywhere else is usually fine. But I will say I'm more likely to pirate music from large artists/companies because I don't support large record companies and their shitty practices.

Similar thing goes for things like Vocaloid, UTAU/OPENUTAU, Synthesizer V, DeepVocal, etcetera, songs because the majority of the time the songs I'm listening to don't have an official download (or a link to a removed file) or way to get it through supporting the person who made them.

However, I don't get why you would ever use Lidarr. Why would you ever download music using torrents? You can use tools like spotdl and yt-dlp to download songs from YouTube music and Spotify, it's faster and more reliable; I have had some issues finding torrents of music from less-known artists.

I make use of deezeloader, deemix and/or streamrip, which is what I use because unlock Spotify deezet, qobuz and tidal (supported by streamrjp) have true lossless flac audio available.

Lidar can be extended to work with them instead of torrents.

I really don't. I do have some of my favorites stored on my Plex server, but lately I've just been using a cracked version of the YouTube music app that lets you do all of the premium things without premium

My card issuer shouldn't get to help itself to the profiling data, and the service shouldn't get to lose my info in the data breach.

I like the idea of using spotdl and yt-dlp but my eyes gloss over as soon as I see that there is no GUI. Lidarr kinda sucks but it gets me pretty close to what I need. Wish I was more comfy without a GUI but don't really have the time to get the hang of it. So it goes.

Youtube and spotify do not offer lossless codecs. I prefer using tools like qbdlx and deemix but not all music can be found on said services. That is where torrents come in.

Ytdlp. It gives a lot of flexibility to download from yt and soundcloud where i build my playlist before adding them on my phone.

Completely agree! There are solutions for letting Lidarr download from Deezer and Tidal, but afaik no other music streaming services for some reason.

I'd go one step further and say pirating music is too big of a hassle in general. Apple Music and Tidal do loseless compression, have huge catalogues and are so dirt cheap I don't understand why you'd make your life so hard on purpose. Once effectively unlimited mobile data became a thing music piracy lost most of its purpose.