Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

I have stopped caring about artists and instead focus on sets, on Soundcloud.

I was thinking about what ditching Spotify would entail last night. While the space involved in storing massive quantities of music is pretty trivial these days, what really makes Spotify for me is their discovery algorithm. I've found soooo much new music that i never would have otherwise just by naturally listening to music i already like and leaving the playlist going when the album is over.

In the span of a few weeks of listening i can go from never having heard an artist or genre before to finding new favorite songs and getting to enjoy how my tastes keep evolving. In the decade or so that I've had Spotify I'd say my tastes have developed more than the twenty years before that, and probably by a pretty wide margin.

I wish i could get that in a form that doesn't support a toxic business model, but it's not like piracy would be putting money in anyone's pockets either. At least when i listen to one of my favorite album a few thousand times the artist gets paid as though i bought the thing, even if it's a smaller portion of my monthly bill than it should be.

finding FLAC or WAV with active seeders feels like striking gold

Not if you're on the right tracker(s)...really should try and get into RED and/or Orpheus.

Locating, storing, labelling, and potentially hosting pirated music is just not something people wanna do. Plus music streaming isn't a fragmented mess like video streaming is atm. I never stopped pirating tv and movies except for a brief window of time when Netflix was king, but music so easy and complete on every platform it isn't worth it.

I just download all of my music with a Telegram bot tbh

If it's on Deezer https://free-mp3-download.net is your friend.

I personally download YouTube videos, convert them to MP3 and then add metadata to them.

I use a modded spotify on ms smartphone but also downloaded some playlists with onthespot and that's all I need

Nicotine and Deemix(you need to pay for hifi for flac quality) is the way to go. I've struggled to do the same and now i am working on a gui app that sort of manages all of these sources together.

Music piracy is definitely less healthy but I doubt it'll ever die. Streaming services cant seem to make their services as easy as free options. I left spotify because they dont have the catalog of youtube. And i didnt even get past the free trial of youtube music because their app wouldn't play half the songs on my already made playlists for unknown reasons. Why pay for a lesser experience when I can NewPipe for free and it works great.

When I was younger I had no income so pirating was how I got music. Now that I have income I buy vinyl records and subscribe to a streaming service.

One thing I've noticed over the years of pirating though is frequently the metadata for the classical music is a mess - relevant information such as conductor and orchestra performing are completely omitted, and these days I just don't want to spend my free time fixing it. Plus, finding pirated lossless tracks remains a challenge, so I just pay my monthly bill and use Idagio.

For most people there are good enough solutions for music without piracy.

High quality lossy format files are available with ease. I have nice cans and good hearing but I don't have the headphones or the ears to hear the difference between a 320Kbps MP3 and a FLAC file.

Bandcamp/HDTracks/7digital/Qobuz/etc make it really easy to buy most modern music DRM free and in a lossless format. I support this because it is a good business model that doesn't treat consumers like criminals.

Try essential house.club, they have what you need plus some.

MP3 0Day on private trackers covers everything.