Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

I read reviews from some music review websites. I also get recommendations from friends. Occasionally, I might go shopping for new music on youtube

I go crate digging through soundcloud and bandcamp every so often, once in a while ill play a mix on youtube. Even if I only really like one or two songs on an album, i usually still download the entirety of it because sometimes i like just having songs on in the background if they fit a vibe i'm feeling. This is especially true for me with vaporwave, probably wouldn't bump it on my commute for example but it can really make me drift mentally if i have it on in the background while say, browsing lemmy or something. And of course for my absolute favourite artists I tend to have almost if not the entire discography.

With a long, varied list of select internet radio stations, you can choose what genre (or special weekly show) you want to listen to at the moment. Picked by people, not algorithms. Keep a playlist of the stations you like best, startup your player (like VLC) with the list, and pick the one you're in the mood for.

Or you could just collect mp3s locally for choosier days, dump a bunch of them into VLC, listen to them in album or random order. In either case, at no cost.

If I hear a song I like in a movie, game or other media I add the song and the discography for the artist to the downloader.

Once I have some free time I listen through those songs and filter out everything I don't like.

The rest gets added to my collection. I never delete songs unless something slipped through like a short interlude.

Lately ive been getting a lot of new music from rateyourmusic.com . I look up an album i like, find some themed lists featuring it that aound interesting (a lot of the lists are like "things i listened to this year", i ignore those), and will hop from list to list as i see interesting looking albums.

What a weird question. I download music I like. Sometimes I buy stuff on Bandcamp or download from YT. I don't use Spotify and I'm an album/artist listener. Am I missing something here? Do people not have personal music libraries any more? Do people now just listen to whatever bullshit Spotify randomly plays? If so, that's sad.

If I hear a song and like it, that works, I'mma download it since shitty rural internet, I may not be able to listen to that song on demand.

Usually go for More obscure rare stuff like video game sound tacks and underground lesser known artists that I find. Eventually, the top ones that pique my interest I will end up buying physical copies or purchased digital files because I wanna show My support.

Whenever I get files in higher quality than you'd normally get from e.g. YouTube Music or Spotify. Currently I'm at a just 9.2 GiB library, but whatever, I don't listen to music too often anyway

I highly recommend Hype Machine for properly new and sometimes unexpected music. Downside is that you need to sort through some stuff you might not enjoy but upside is pretty solid when you find a new artist! More organic than any of the prediction-based discovery apps.