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
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.
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.
