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.

I'd love to hear about any places to look for this. I sometimes want to download some favourite songs, just in case they go down on any music services or youtube.

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.

Deemix is how I get access to .flac downloads. Yea, I still am paying for Deezer, but it's also technically still piracy. I have 345.7 GiB of music downloaded currently on my NAS and I play it with DeadBeeF or foobar2k if I'm on Windows.

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

I feel there is room for improvement over the soulseek network, though that's about the best there is right now. It doesn't take advantage of downloading from multiple peers (like torrents), quality is good in practice but hard to be sure until you listen, and is missing rare / non-western music.

While streaming apps offer a decent value, I don't like the level of lock in. I have music from CDs and other sources that are a first class part of my library, and using only a streaming app would make them harder to access.

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.