Soulseek is the goto piracy thing for music.

Streaming service ripping is alive and well.

Youtube scrapers like Newpipe and alternative frontend makes listening easy if you aren't quality obsessed. This has been adequate for my levels of listening.

Some private trackers have massive music collection dumps.

However, I'd say directly supporting artists through storefronts like bandcamp is the best way to go, where it's available. No DRM, no bullshit, the artist benefits. This, to me, is the best alternative to piracy.

Napster, Deezer, Tidal aren't terrible offerings either FWIW.

Spotify is very affordable and provides pretty much all music on earth. I'm not interested in jumping through hoops to download songs if I can just conveniently stream them all from one legit service.

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

It's certainly alive and exists.

But access to music is easy and affordable. It's more inconvenient for me to pirate it than just use a streaming service.

I also listen to a lot of independent artists and rather buy their stuff to support them.

I buy on Bandcamp and pirate through Soulseek (specifically Nicotine+).

I also buy Vinyls.

Torrenting music has been pretty trash for me so I haven't bothered in ages.

Soulseek has most of what you need. 3ost has pretty rare stuff and rutracker as well

why pirate when bandcamp has everything I want on FLAC for pennies and I get to send lewd messages to my favourite artists when I buy stuff

For music from artists that don't exist anymore I mostly use ddl. If the artist is still there and offers a decent way of giving them money, I usually do that.

I pay for family spotify - we all use it a lot and the Daily Mixes, Release Radar, Discover Weekly playlists are unbeatble. I've used Tidal, Deezer, Youtube music before but their playlist creation is nowwhere near as good.

However I do download from Deemix as a backup . For me 128kbp is totally fine for what I need - yes its not the highest quality, but through bluetooth speakers in the car or bluetooth headphones it sounds absolutely fine for me. It might not be CD quality, but its better than broadcast radio, which is perfectly good enough for me.

I have Spotify through a family plan but I do download backups for when the enshitification happens to them.

I just use lidarr with the deezloader script. Sign up for a month of deezer premium every six months and just download my back log. For $30/yr I always have a relatively up to date, lossless quality, music library backup.

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

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

I personally like being able to use Spotify as my front-end, but it doesn't support flac. So I personally pay for Deezer's Flac option, I use xManager for listening to music on Spotify, and I have a script setup to automatically download all my liked Spotify songs from Deezer in lossless flac. It's not free by any means, but is the best/easiest way to download music I've found.

https://github.com/jbh-cloud/spotify_sync

Not for me, I'm pirating tons of songs in these days. Try Soulseek it's a gold mine of good music with great quality

The soulseek network is still alive and well.

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

I'ma get hate for this but I'm not pirating out of principle but when I think something it's to expensive for it's price. I live in a country with good salaries and have to work less than one hour for one month of endless music. To me that is a good deal but I am aware that it is not to everyone especially those from other countries. I mostly pirate Movies and TV Shows because you would need to pay over 50€/month to get access to all services.

Pandora slowed a lot of my music collecting. Spotify and an unlimited data plan on my phone all but stopped it.

Don't need to dedicate 500+gb on my phone to my music if I can just pull up whatever I want. The only stuff I keep on my phone now is Dwelling of Duels and some game remixes.

I don't think it's dying at all. Check out private music trackers like https://redacted.ch/index.php or https://interview.orpheus.network/

OiNK -> WHAT.CD -> RED

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.

Rutracker.org maybe. I find pretty much every music I want on it. Though i mostly listen mainstream so maybe it is easier to find it.