since setting up a navidrome server, i've been working through our record collection trying to find online download codes to get digital copies of our music that we own (should have been done previously, but now is better than never)--and i've run into issues where the downloadable copies are no longer available
after seeing this i promptly sailed the high seas to acquire a flac copy of the album (and will continue to seed). similarly i've had records include codes to low quality mp3 downloads. i've also noticed a lot of albums purchased on bandcamp are no longer available for download.
i hope more people start moving to mp3 players or maaaybe selfhosting and that purchasing high quality music is a bit more normal in the coming years. but as i am still quite happy with bandcamp after being bought out, i don't have a lot of hope that it will be around forever as it had seen layoffs. fingers crossed though.
anyways, go to shows, support your local band, cancel your subscriptions, and if you can't buy (due to lack of funds, or availability) download and seed.
bummer that you've had issues with arch. but i don't really understand the issues you've had. like setting up reflector should solve the mirrors, and checking the newsfeed before updating will solve a lot of other issues. In the last year I think there was only one, maybe two times that there was manual intervention required from me--and they were both trivial; and the convenience of never having to worry about doing a distro upgrade is so nice... Other than that, hyprland is changing frequently so sometimes you need to update your config--but again, just read the release notes or use a wm that updates less (like sway, dwm). But the changes have never taken more than 20 seconds to fix, and they've never been breaking for me. Maybe some of your issues were due to the DDOS attacks that have been going on? Also how much do you use the AUR?
while i think this is overstated, i do agree that you need to be a certain kind of person to enjoy arch.