After much deliberation, I have reached the conclusion that the morally righteous punishment for those who would lock their files on Soulseek is the electric chair.

@eighthbell >Not buying music and playing it locally

@Zergling_man
>downloads the album you just spent 50 shekels on for free and plays it in Winamp

@eighthbell @Zergling_man
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

@sicp @eighthbell I don't care about CDs, I care about giving money to the band so they can keep doing their thing.

@Zergling_man @sicp Shitposting aside, a lot of the groups I listen to aren't active anymore anyways. If I did personally buy the CDs or vinyls, most of it would just be going to some dude on Ebay lol. Also streaming gives the bands a pittance in return, sure it's better than nothing but eh.

@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.

@beardalaxy @sicp @Zergling_man I was originally on Spotify/steaming for a long time as well FWIW, I switched in late 2023. I guess the main issue is that as I got more into scouring the depths I came across more and more albums that weren't available on streaming. Some of which have honestly become among my very favourite albums of all-time, such as Denison Marrs' "Holding Hands @ 35,000 Feet" which I remember being a pivotal part of my decision to dabble in local files. The whole ecosystem just seems like an artificial prison as far as discovery goes, so many will take an album off their listening list if it's not on Spotify. And yeah, the licensing stuff you mentioned where shit just gets randomly taken down is total ass.

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.