I use satclubbing for electronic music and metal tracker metal. Something else I've started doing is getting second hand CDs. They are going really cheap right now and will likely become vintage and sought after in a decade odd. I basically buy them and rip them and keep them in storage.

I consider myself a rookie audiophile. I must have my music files in flac format and they must be directly on my hard drive. I buy a bit of stuff from bandcamp and qobuz, but for my methods, there's a few routes I can take to get the majority through piracy.

The one I've chosen is called slav art, and it basically rips directly from streaming services and zips it in a downloadable file. It used to be on discord but got chased away, and it used to be on matrix after that but left there too for some reason. Now it's on its own revolt instance.

You can pay for any streaming service that serves FLAC and rip that. Very easy to do for Tidal and Deezer for example.

Somehow free-mp3-download.net has every Song i've asked for until now, ~~with both 320kbp/s MP3 and even flac Downloads.~~ apparantly Just transcoded 128kbp/s Files

While youtube vanced is falling apart, vanced music is still running just fine for me :D

Not for me, I don't like to have my music online, I download every song that I like and keep it stored on my drives. I mostly download from Youtube

Does ViMusic/Spotube count? They're alternative youtube music/spotify front ends with no ads. If so, then I'd say piracy is still going strong!

Dying is an overstatement, I'm sure the scene is there.

But it's not as popular as most people are generally able to easily access all the music they want legally for reasonable prices.

I've been meaning to start a music collection for a bunch of old goth music from small bands that risks being lost to time. Thanks for this post I'm gonna get my ass moving on it.

I just find the music theme that I desire to have on Spotify or YT, and then I ripoff from there. Pretty easy.

I only dig for music on discogs.

#vinyllife

Music piracy is doing just fine, it's just that the balance of opinion seems to be that M4A is fine. You can even download M4A files from YouTube nowadays.

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

I think a subscription to Spotify, Apple Music, etc is that one subscription most are willing to pay and never give up because it's so convenient, and fairly cheap. I'd rather give up every other subscription before I even considered giving up Spotify.

Music piracy is still there, but it's just not as convenient these days.

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.

I used yt-dl for downloading, but since I have a decent flat, I switched to just using yt music with adblocker or revanced.

What benefits do torrents of music provide over just downloading from yt?

For me it's pretty much dead. Since I've got YT music subscription I don't download music anymore, except some rare, obscure bands from past. Because modern, rare obscure I can support via Bandcamp and the likes. For real gold mine of music checkout soulseek. If it's not there, you can assume it doesn't exists

Psychedelic trance is an awesome, but absolutely niche genre. It's enjoyed by only a handful of people on earth, and made by even fewer. With sites like rupsy and psy-music going dark this sort of stuff is getting really hard to find. Having said that, it's one of the few genres I don't mind paying the money for a good release - it's niche as fuck. The real problem lays with identifying what IS a good release.

Last time I checked there were still new psy releases popping up on rutracker from time to time. Streaming basically sucks for psy, and most mainstream trackers absolutely suck for psy and techno.

There might be some cool new site that the doofers are hiding out on and we're out of the loop ;p

I feel like it's easier than ever. I just rip official album playlists from Youtube Music. Quality should be on par with what you get from Spotify or iTunes. Personally, I've never found any official sources for music that doesn't use lossy compression, so I don't feel like it's possible to miss much by doing it like this.

Spotify is dirt cheap for me(Less than a dollar per month) and I really like the recommendations.

But if they pull a Netflix then I'll just leave.

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'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.

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 actually built a stereo system that can play CDs recently and have stared buying used CDs to play on it.

I don't really mind paying the equivalent of a drink or two from a vending machine for an album from a band that I like. And I get a neat physical thing that I can look at.