Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

finding FLAC or WAV with active seeders feels like striking gold

Not if you're on the right tracker(s)...really should try and get into RED and/or Orpheus.

I'd love to hear about any places to look for this. I sometimes want to download some favourite songs, just in case they go down on any music services or youtube.

For me it's pretty much dead. Since I've got YT music subscription I don't download music anymore, except some rare, obscure bands from past. Because modern, rare obscure I can support via Bandcamp and the likes. For real gold mine of music checkout soulseek. If it's not there, you can assume it doesn't exists

I really like Apple Music. Actually supports lossless, unlike Spotify, and it just feels much more music focused. Spotify has become too bloated, and I view it more as a "sound" app than a music app.

Music piracy is definitely less healthy but I doubt it'll ever die. Streaming services cant seem to make their services as easy as free options. I left spotify because they dont have the catalog of youtube. And i didnt even get past the free trial of youtube music because their app wouldn't play half the songs on my already made playlists for unknown reasons. Why pay for a lesser experience when I can NewPipe for free and it works great.

I feel there is room for improvement over the soulseek network, though that's about the best there is right now. It doesn't take advantage of downloading from multiple peers (like torrents), quality is good in practice but hard to be sure until you listen, and is missing rare / non-western music.

While streaming apps offer a decent value, I don't like the level of lock in. I have music from CDs and other sources that are a first class part of my library, and using only a streaming app would make them harder to access.

I personally download YouTube videos, convert them to MP3 and then add metadata to them.

I have stopped caring about artists and instead focus on sets, on Soundcloud.

I just download all of my music with a Telegram bot tbh