It's totally dumb because it's not about getting a good deal for consumers or artists, purely about rights-holders maximising revenue. If they can't negotiate a good enough deal in a region they'll simply not allow it to be streamed. This is what happens when they separate the cultural value of "content" from the monetary value of it, the perceived desirability. Viewers and listeners want a good show to watch or album to hear, rights-holders simply want to get a good deal, regardless of what the stuff it.

Yeah, I once discovered an artist, even bought some albums, only to notice about a year later that the place I discovered them was now blocked in my country. If I would've come a year later, I would never have bought these albums.

Quick guide that's been shared around online lately for those unsure what this is:

they're asking for you to hand over your wallet, repeatedly

Ahh remember the good ol times when you could insert a jrpg cd into a cd player and could listen to all the music.

I see more often than I'd like to see retconned and greyed out releases in my playlist...
The fuck am I paying them.
God do I hate those publisher licensing agreements.

Bruh this is piracy community, fuck geoblock

they’re literally taking money out of my pocket

That'd be pretty hard to do over the internet.

Did the sales increase as an effect of them taking it down?

Got a sample preview of your favorite release?

(Presumably you’re not on Spotify since they’re not paying anything.)

This is actually one of the less effective examples of geoblocking that someone could ever imagine.

Russian warez sites are only "Russian" because they're run by local admins as pirate sites located in the Global South have tendency to have a longer lifespan and less chances to end their days by being raided than hosted in the Western world. Most part of such sites users / uploaders are from worldwide, for example, if you'll check your active peers for any active rutracker upload, you'll see, that only small part of them have Russian flag. So such geoblocking makes literally zero impact, as it never prevents user from any other country from uploading the tunes to such website.

Also all Russian users are already geoblocked, as they won't buy anything from you (even if they would want to) because most of webservices that you could use to promote your album won't be able to charge their cards due to sanctions. And if some of such users use foreign VPN + credit card combo and are able to use such services, they are not affected by your geoblocking, as they're attached to different region.

Bandcamp is also good. You get flac downloads and the artists get money and more so than on other platforms

enshittification?

"Enshittification"

Usenet and Soulseek

For me, I subscribe to Deezer (or you can do a trial) and run Deemix which is able to download the music in MP3 or FLAC. It directly downloads the music using Deezer's API.

As far as organizing it goes, I typically just host it with Plex or a Subsonic player like Navidrome.

bandcamp but pay the artists please it's really fun to do i promise