Straight up piracy at this point.

I have vanilla-ass white boy musical tastes, so I've had little issue finding what I want on Soulseek.

That said, there is one thing about Soulseek that's not advertised: there's a freaking enormous list of "blacklisted" terms that won't return search results even if the data is there.

Lots of banned artist and album names that will return zero results, unless you do something like search for a song or two that's on the album you want and finding the data that way.

Might be worth seeing if changing what you're specifically searching for improves your results, since I was dealing with like 70% completion until someone told me about that ah, feature.

Edit: and you can have my iPod from my cold dead hands.

Bandcamp is still OK for me and I listen to some fairly obscure stuff.

Just to offer a heads up - there's a new solution/site which is currently in Beta but is backed by good people (musicians). It needs an influx of music diversity (lots of metal at the moment) but if it gets that when it comes out of beta then it could very well be a good Bandcamp replacament - Ampwall

150,000 track collection owner here.

CDs are king, but the cost adds up. A lot of artists I follow are on Bandcamp, which I use to purchase my music. I assume everything I buy there will eventually be removed, so I don't rely on them for archiving it.

But then, there's the piracy route, which I do for a good portion of my library. Rutracker is absolutely fantastic for lossless. Soulseek is solid, but you gotta use it in a smart way for some releases. Some keywords don't turn up any results for some reason. So, to find certain albums/artists, try searching for a particular song, then browse by folder on those results to find full albums, if that makes sense.

Why not use Qobuz or Deezer to rip music? Qobuz-dl and Deemix let you rip FLAC from those services if you have a streaming acct. I use Deemix with my Deezer acct to download a TON of music I cant find anywhere else.

Its a lot of work, I agree. But it's doable. At this point, as services get shittier, pirate. They need to learn that as their services get shittier, people will leave. Give them a financial reason to get better ;)

Piracy. I'd buy albums if I had money, though. I'll slowly phase into getting them once I get some more cash.

I can find most stuff I listen to, and I rarely grow my music library. I mostly listen to 20-30 albums, with some more mainstream music peppered in.

My music library currently sits at 90 gigabytes (mostly flacs), so quite small compared to others I've seen around here. Still, I have plenty of variation to keep me entertained :D

If you have Tidal, aren't there some apps to rip the lossless audio from there? You could get most of the stuff that you need, and then cancel the subscription. If you feel bad, maybe order some merch from the band, haha.

The answer to your question of why it's so hard to give artists your money is exactly the same as it has been for ages for all media. The few companies who survived the consolidation of the industry have done everything in their power to make sure they are the gatekeepers of content. They buy and merge or kill off any competing companies or technologies.

They weren't successful with MP3s or with streaming because they didn't bother to understand the technology or that the Internet was the new marketplace and thought they could just do what they had done with physical media and pay for laws that protected their interests and sue everyone, but they ultimately lost control because you can't sue hundreds of millions of people like you can sue a few thousand stores. So they had to give the people what they wanted for a while so they could have time to buy up all of the companies.

But they've now done that and paid enough to get the laws and precedents on interpreting those laws that they wanted, so courts are becoming better at enforcing those laws more quickly. So they can pressure new tech that pushes the limits on interpreting the laws to not last long enough to get people hooked. And now that they've reconsolidated most of the market and technologies as capitalism tends to do if you're patient enough and there's no possibility of monopoly regulation or market disruption, we're stuck with pirate or use the garbage they feed to us and most artists are back to having to sign their art away and sleep with executives to get the marketing and distribution from the gatekeepers just to get a chance at success. The rest have to rely on word of mouth and self distribution which even online can be expensive without the advantages of centralized hosting providers, merchant accounts, and bandwidth.

Pirate the music and send $20 to the artists venmo

CDs for me. If you buy a big disc binder they really don't take up that much room. Its about the same size as the 1971 compact OED that sits on the same shelf.

If I really wanted to get rid of them I'd just donate them to the local library system. The ones they don't want they'd resell as a fundraiser.

I'll be honest and say that most of my self hosted music collection was pirated or ripped from CD like 20 years ago. I put it all on an iPod back then.

I found the iPod gathering dust in a drawer when I finally got a car with a usb jack a couple years ago (yeah I'm not exactly laden with bags of cash over here) and recently pulled all that music back onto my newly set up media server.

I have a Spotify family account I'm trying to phase out with resistance from the children.

To support artists I go and see them when they tour and buy a ludicrously expensive t-shirt

Not gonna lie, that must be one hell of an obscure (or new) song if it's not available on Soulseek. If your song happen to be Japanese, try Ototoy.jp. That's where I get most of my FLAC albums.

I am in a similar boat. Since you have Tidal might want to look into Tidal-dl to "backup" the things you especially like in high quality.

Tidal is actually not too bad, and it pays artists more than other services (not a lot, just more) but I do expect it to go downhill/away eventually so I make a habit of downloading what I can and supporting the artist directly in other ways.

bandcamp and piracy are still the main routes. try to look at the artist's soundcloud too for links to what they use. some genres (like trance for me) still heavily use soundcloud

For ripping from Tidal/Qobuz, use Lucida.to I use an iPod Mini, a Jellyfin server and I either rip / dl from slsk/ rip w lucida I also use a modded YT client on my iPhone

Minidisc

For me, most of the artists I follow are in band camp. I haven't feel any enshitification on it so far, and I don't love giving me money to epic either, but there is also bandcamp Friday. For whoever is not on it, I just pirate (torrent) or download from qobuz using a throwaway account on trial, trying to buy cds, merch or whatever from the artist.

If I can, I buy direct downloads.

If I can't do that, I'll buy the CD (as long as its direct or a small label).

If I can't, or its one of the big labels, I'll find it elsewhere. I'd rather buy merch to support the artist directly than buy anything that goes through the big labels.

Like you I try to support artists by purchasing physical media or releases on Bandcamp. Outside of that I get my music on Soulseek, through torrents, Usenet, and occasionally XDCC. I don’t need lossless files and even if I download FLACs I transcode them to 320kbps MP3 before they go on my iPod anyway. The harder it becomes to acquire music legally the less bad I feel about downloading with abandon.

The music being removed from your account shit shouldn't be legal. You paid for it they should be refunding you if they are removing access, in a perfect world anyway.

Assuming the US when I say this but, some year we'll have consumer protections, I'll likely be dead by then but hopefully the day will come to light.

That being said I have never heard of soul seek, it sounds like a limewire spinoff? I agree music industry has /sucked/ in terms of obtaining stuff

I don't self-host my music streaming currently (lack of funds) but I'm planning to in the future. I live in a large city and borrow CDs from the library to rip at home. This might not work for more obscure stuff or if you don't have a good library in your area, but this way I don't need to make more space for CDs and I support the library doing it. If I want to support artists, I get merch and/or go to concerts.

I gave up trying to do the right thing now I just torrent everything and use Plex amp to steam to whatever it had worked fine for me

So mostly I try to get my music from Bandcamp, artists' websites, or iTunes. With these methods I don't have to correct any info through Kid3 and normally have the correct album art for Navidrome.

If they don't have an option to purchase their music I'll use soulseek or yt-dlp to download it. That's normally for obscure artists, music that can't be sold due to Copyrights, or sanctioned countries (for example Russian musicians).

I've found that self-hosting my music has helped me slow down my music consumption and be more picky about what I listen to. I've also found good quality applications such as Feishen (macOS), play:Sub (iOS), and Symfonium (Android).

I don't buy music like I used to, but when I do it's probably a CD from the artists site, or something like nugs.net that usually have several lossless download formats. I listen to mostly live music these days though, so anything else is probably on etree or archive.org.

My way:
Subbed to Spotify and really and heavily using it. Highly liked songs were ripped from Spotify.
Some artists I import CDs from overseas
Some songs I'll buy digitally though I prefer CDs as digital music is harder to pirate than even buying a CD second hand (i love discogs)
If I am not in the mood to setup my spotify ripping, I'll go on SLSK or scoure the web for flac downloads.

yt-dlp

i host a funkwhale pod and load content to it off qobuz and deezer.

I mostly use Spotify, but have the flacs of a few albums I really like on navidrome. As for how I got them... Yeah. I do have the for CDs a few of them but I don't have a CD reader and most of them are completely destroyed, so I feel like piracy is justified for those.

I personally have been trying to setup a music library just for my ipod classic, and no matter what I do I keep finding duplicate songs. I also plan to self host my music library to access from my phone when I don't have my ipod, but first I want to get rid of dupes which makes this so frustrating.

I buy phisical media and lately I'm listening to internet radio again. There are streams in flac even.

I buy music, at least CD quality. I might splash out for 24-bits if given the choice (only because it seems to be standard on Bandcamp so for consistency I aim for the same in other stores), but not for > 48 kHz.

I upload to my server for archival purposes, but will convert to mp3 to sync to my devices. I buy CD quality poorly for archival purposes. I can't tell the difference. Plus I have navidrome and I can stream, but having my entire library available at all times, even when offline, is very important to me.

I buy, in order of preference, from Bandcamp, 7digital, and only as a last resort from Qobuz. If even Qobuz doesn't have something then I go on Amazon to buy the CD. I hate Qobuz ever since they removed the download all button. I remind them of it with the feedback form with every purchase. It was the reason I will prefer 7digital over Qobuz. I don't know why you say 7digital is dead. They have up to date titles for the music I care about (metal). The only thing I dislike about 7digital is the http (no https) download, but I'd rather risk that than support Qobuz with its dark patterns.

I still use bandcamp a lot. Rip CDs I get from other artists directly. Rutracker for stuff that's unavailable from the artist or label. On my PC I use jriver to organize and listen to my digital audio library. I use syncthing to send selected files to my mobile. On my mobile I use SicMu player. This system works pretty well for me and it strikes the right balance - supporting artists when I can, getting a variety of high quality files, not paying for any streaming service, not having physical clutter... and it's fun to curate my mobile playlist. Feels like the good old ipod classic days.