listening on spotify
downloading youtube mp3s
buying the cd and ripping to flac
downloading from soulseek and playing it in winamp
pirating satellite radio broadcasts
sneaking into live concerts
listening to it inside your head
ひげ
@eighthbell @sicp @Zergling_man if you want to support artists, buying CDs and streaming are about the same things. record labels will look at the numbers, mostly. the bands don't see the vast majority of the money from either of those, though, not directly at least. doing that will just go towards making sure they stay signed.
the best way to support bands monetarily is by going to their shows and buying merch at their shows. that costs a fuck ton of money though, of course. i only go to shows of bands i REALLY want to see because i'm going to be spending like $100. local and smaller shows are fun to go to, but it's usually harder to get someone to go with because they aren't as well known.
i'll buy music from indies i really like on bandcamp or whatever, because they actually see a lot more of that money. if anything, they maybe go through a distributor that takes 20% or whatever.
for everything else, i have a deezer subscription. it's great for finding new music and following releases, as well as being able to stream stuff where i don't have it downloaded. deezer has a pretty unique system for paying artists that i like. you can look it up if you want.
i use a program called murglar to download the high quality FLACs from deezer. it's super easy. i use MusicBee for my music player on PC and PowerAmp on Android.
the main reason i started downloading shit again instead of streaming is because in 2025 a bunch of streaming licenses ran out and fucked up my music library. there are also things like region locks and artists/labels randomly removing shit. like, sorry if you want to listen to king gizzard and you only have spotify. musicians can make great music but most of them are still pretty libtarded and record companies are gay.
Didn't know that about the physical records, I assumed that bands would make quite a bit more from purchasing those. Concerts are unfortunately kind of a no-go for me because I have sensitive hearing and struggle with loud noises. That said, Bandcamp does seem pretty cool and I think I'll give it a look to see if any of the newer bands I like are on there.
@eighthbell @sicp @Zergling_man depends on the band with CDs, if you're buying them at a show they usually make more off of them there. that said, the ones selling CDs at shows usually don't have a whole lot of label overhead anyway because the bigger names don't really do that anymore. if you're buying CDs online though, that's still being produced by the label and they also have to factor in manufacturing and distribution. i'm sure that's another reason why labels like streaming so much, they don't have to spend nearly as much money on music releases and they get to keep just as much.
as a musician, i don't have my music on streaming sites to make money, it's for people to listen to easily. i make the most money playing live, by far. gonna be making some CDs this year to sell too, the shitty kind with a slim jewel case and sharpie marker.
@eighthbell @sicp @Zergling_man red vox, my favorite band, is run basically at net 0. it was heavily subsidized by the lead singer's twitch stream in the earlier years. most artists lose money doing what they love. i can't speak for everyone, especially because i DO make money on it (even if only a little bit), but what matters most is that people listen and enjoy. the money is just nice to have, and obviously more money means more time to devote to it so you don't have to do other shit, but most musicians are going to keep doing it to some degree regardless.
@eighthbell @sicp @Zergling_man sidenote, what really drew me to deezer in the first place (other than hifi) was the fact you can actually upload music from your offline library into your account. was super nice for demos, japanese shit, video game music, etc.