I really don’t feel the need to. I pay fair prices for my music and get it how I want it when I want it where I want it.
Im not pirating to shaft people out of money
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.
Especially for smaller/indie artists I wait for Bandcamp Fridays so all of the money goes straight to them (Fuck Epic). Buying even one album for $5-10 is more than they would earn from thousands of Spotify listens from you.
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
Spotify is literally the only subscription service that I haven't cut ties with, because as much as I hate its horrific data harvesting, I'm running it on GrapheneOS with legitimately next to zero privileges in a sandbox, and for what I'm paying, I truly do feel I'm getting my money's worth. I use it every single day, and while I have all my music stored locally (as in legitimately scraped and downloaded, not 'downloaded'), I only did so as a precaution just in case Spotify decides to fuck things up and I also choose to cancel it as well.
Try vimusic, from what i've seen its just spotify without the data harvesting (and the api's taken from youtube music, shouldn't change much though)
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.
Bandcamp my friend!
Very fair point - Spotify does shaft a lot of their artists from what I’ve heard. As the other user mentioned, bandcamp gets brought up a lot. Try reachin out to some bands over email maybe and see what they say!
Yep. That's why I pay Spotify but stopped paying netflix. Fuck this need to subscribe to countless streaming services.
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.
Streaming sites are convenient up until you want to listen to that mildly obscure artist from your country your parents used to listen to back in the early 50s. Then it's absolute bollocks.
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.
Music piracy isn’t dead but it’s a shell of what it was. You can see even here most people would rather just stream
Soulseek needs more users though as the proportion of locked file users keeps increasing
Yeah fuck those traders and scammers. Soulseek isn't created for that shit.
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.
You don’t own the music so it can be edited/taken away as desired by the DSP
Also me personally very little of what I listen to is on DSPs and a lot isn’t even on YouTube but I recognize this as an extreme outlier
Nicotine+ is such a wild name for a piece of software.
Support your favourite artists directly. That wasn’t an option in the Napster days.
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.
Don't forget stream ripping. I used to rip internet radio direct to MP3 with no quality loss and then go back and manually edit the files for playback gaps, keeping the best in case of duplicate recordings. If you have really niche interests it sometimes was literally the only way to get copies of some tracks, especially rare remixes.
Soulseek is great for finding and sharing music. I would strongly recommend Nicotine+ over the old SoulseekQt
I waffle on whether I should use my VPN or not with it.
Support your favourite artists directly. That wasn’t an option in the Napster days.
I like to have the older versions of songs before they "Remaster" and change them and if they stop selling everything but the remasters, it's time to fire it up.
I'm really happy with just downloading directly from youtube
I guess that will do if the kind of music you listen to doesn't need to be high quality.
I share a pretty good size collection of music and fonts on Soulseek.
I've got slskd and lidarr set up with jellyfin and FinAmp on my phone and honestly I don't open Spotify except to discover new music
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