The soulseek network is still alive and well.

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.

why pirate when bandcamp has everything I want on FLAC for pennies

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.

Since Apple Music / Spotify I don’t find it necessary. Far more likely to pirate TV / movies because they’re spread out across so many different services and require so many different subscriptions.

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.

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.

I have people download my files on soulseek/nicotine+ daily. Plus anyone that would pirate music probably already know how to rip it straight from streaming services.

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.

Personally, I tend to only pirate music files that I just can't find anywhere else. For example, audiophile quality 45rpm vinyl rips of albums that might have only been sold in that format once, and for a very limited run. In cases like that, I almost feel a responsibility to maintain a copy because it is something that could very easily disappear from existence.

The guys doing the rips understand that they might own one of maybe a few hundred copies of a certain album, so they rip at audiophile quality and share.

As the normies went to streaming it became more gatekept and toxic. I’m mainly familiar with the attitude of trades only or straight up selling tracks (eg groupbuys with kids paying thousands of dollars for some shitty Kanye mumble demo). The game didn’t used to be like that. The days of the blogs with mega/rapid share links are long gone

I mean you got all the stream rippers eg SlavArt which is super nice. Soulseek is still alright but getting taken over by traders. RED/OPS around but you can’t just waltz in and I’d argue they don’t compare to what.cd or even OinK. RuTracker still got stuff going on

But when you’re after actual rare stuff that you can’t just buy or stream it can be real tough nowadays. Scene archives can be nice but very hard to get access and it’s mostly mp3s.

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

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've always wondered why today you would torrent music instead of just downloading the audio from another site like yt.

The only upside I could see to torrenting music is the better quality, which is fair I guess, if you want super high quality.

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.

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

Music is hard to find on public trackers. RED and ORP are awesome private trackers that have basically anything you can think of. And if its not use the deezload telegram bot and send it a link to the song on deezer

Or you can you soulseek. That's still very viable even today

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

quite a bunch of services that can pull high quality music directly from streaming sites. straight up lossless stuff as well

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 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

I still use soulseek, been using it for nearly 20 years at this point

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 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.

Music is a weird subject for me. I download practically everything else to have a copy of it on my hard drives. 30+TB of anime, movies, tv shows, manga, audiobooks, etc but music is the one thing I dont really download or listen to very often. I have a modded Spotify app that I use for the times I do listen to music. I do this so i dont have to pay for a subscription, but that is as far as my music piracy goes.

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

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 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.

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

god, there's lot of telegram bots which can download music from services like deezer/spotify/soundcloud/etc

from my perspective, music piracy is not dying anytime soon

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.