I live in Europe. Had Spotify for about 5 years, stopped paying and using 6 months ago.
I usually buy from Bandcamp, mostly non mainstream music, and download in FLAC and store it on my server. I can stream through the app on my phone when I’m out.
For the ones I can’t find on Bandcamp, or albums from major labels, I tend to find it on Qobuz in MP3. Pricing trends to be similar everywhere.
My pirating nowadays is mainly for old music or establish artists.
Edit: autocorrect
What software do you use for that? I think I really need something like this, I have too much stuff that will never be on Spotify, like local band bootleg shows and video game remixes.
Slskd - https://github.com/slskd/slskd/
It uses the soulseek network (an old favourite of mine) installed though docker accessible through a browser.
If you want a desktop app, I recommend Nicotine+ for Linux or visit https://www.slsknet.org/news/node/1 for Windows.
I scan understand that you prefer to pay for your music, personally I prefer support artists in other ways than buying from platform.
I don’t put my music on my server simply because i prefer to have music directly on local, it’s not that heavy so I prefer having my music directly on hand. Even with the possibility of self hosting it.
The artists I like don’t come around where I live, so I can’t support through live music. I’ve done it in the past when I lived in a large city. In the end we’re all trying our best. And we all have our use cases, there’s no right way to listen to music.
