Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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

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 like it.

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.

I follow YT accounts that post music that I'm interested in such as Vapor Memory or Cryo Chamber. I'm also on the mailing lists of several artists on Bandcamp so I get notified of new releases. I ask friends for recommendations, I ask on forums, other places. Really not that hard.

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.

I just set up lidarr with all artists I like listening to and tell it to download everything they've made. That's how I have about 700gb of flac files

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.

If I find something and I don't have it, yet, I download it.

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.

I add stations to my radio app, like Ancient FM, Cosmo Vintage, Intergalactic FM, King Dub, Nightwave Plaza, Radio Nova. Tons of cool stuff comes up, most is tagged. If I really like it I soulseek it. I stopped downloading whole albums by default, good tunes end up in my assorted folder. I throw out stuff I don't listen to as well, I'm not a hoarder.

Listen to a song. I like the song. I download the song. It's not rocket science.

I like a song from a artist so I download the entire catalog. Lossless where I can

Bandcamp has been pretty good for me to find the stuff I like listening to.

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.

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.

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.

bandcamp is awesome.

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

To everyone in here saying they download entire discographies, great! I agree. But the follow up question is how do you even find out about new (to you) artists that you might like? I've cross referenced the library I have (about 27k tracks) with the "similar artists" sections of Spotify, last.fm, etc, and I feel like I'm just going around in circles. All of the similar artists are just similar to each other and I have all of it already. How do you branch out?

I just download .MP3 or m4as of everything I add to my liked songs on Spotify. I pay for Spotify, but the offline functionality is bogus so I also keep regular copies of everything and don't rely on whatever dumbass propriety offline format Spotify uses because it never actually plays anything when offline that way.