Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Storage is cheap, and music (even in FLAC format) is small. You can fit tens of thousands of songs into a terabyte.

I download anything and everything. An artist I enjoy? Entire discography. I've only heard one song? Entire discography--there may be more I might enjoy! An artist in a genre I like but I've never heard? Entire discography.

I'm at over 125k songs, and I still feel like my collection is a sliver. I eventually want to reach 1m songs and truly become my own Spotify. Finding songs I've never heard before and that I end up loving in my own collection is a joy I can't describe.

If I like it I download it, save the whole album or discography. Archive everything. Never delete. Same for books and movies and shows, though I find myself watching less of those lately.

https://github.com/RandomNinjaAtk/arr-scripts/tree/main/lidarr downloads automatically. I don't really decide. I add artists when I see one missing.

It's more important to contribute to musicbrainz than to my library. If musicbrainz has it, I can dosnload it, if not, I can't download it either.

To everyone in here saying they download entire discographies, great! I agree. But the follow up question is how do you even find out about new (to you) artists that you might like? I've cross referenced the library I have (about 27k tracks) with the "similar artists" sections of Spotify, last.fm, etc, and I feel like I'm just going around in circles. All of the similar artists are just similar to each other and I have all of it already. How do you branch out?

I like a song from a artist so I download the entire catalog. Lossless where I can

Like other people, whole discographies. Artist URL straight into deemix and let it do it's thing.

For finding new music, I mostly rely on radiostations such as Kerrang! and YouTube subscriptions or recommendations.

MP3 320 is what I go for, I don't have the equipment to benefit from FLAC.

I set and forget too, never delete. You never know when it'll become impossible to get that data back if you want it.

If i like it.

Honestly i mostly download songs on .mp3 format individually.

Unless someone has been kind enough to compile the entire album on a .zip file

I just set up lidarr with all artists I like listening to and tell it to download everything they've made. That's how I have about 700gb of flac files

Didn't know last fm was still around. I ditched them after they were breached. Musicbrainz is an apt alternative. I'm still bummed about how bad AI is at recommending similar songs /a artists. I'll grab random stuff and stuff from Musicbrainz recommendatiins. I definitely delete stuff I don't like, not for saving space but mainly just to keep my library tight. I also have nightmares about being in a coma and someone finding my music collection and thinking it's something I really like but really it's 80% garbage that I can't stand and they play it for me in a loop for weeks and I can't tell them to stop because of coma. I'm also pretty vocal in my life about not really liking country music, not because I want to be a judgemental jerk about it, but mainly because of the coma thing, and I want to make sure I'm not stuck listening to that in the coma.

I read reviews from some music review websites. I also get recommendations from friends. Occasionally, I might go shopping for new music on youtube

Listen to a song. I like the song. I download the song. It's not rocket science.

I add stations to my radio app, like Ancient FM, Cosmo Vintage, Intergalactic FM, King Dub, Nightwave Plaza, Radio Nova. Tons of cool stuff comes up, most is tagged. If I really like it I soulseek it. I stopped downloading whole albums by default, good tunes end up in my assorted folder. I throw out stuff I don't listen to as well, I'm not a hoarder.

If I hear a song I like in a movie, game or other media I add the song and the discography for the artist to the downloader.

Once I have some free time I listen through those songs and filter out everything I don't like.

The rest gets added to my collection. I never delete songs unless something slipped through like a short interlude.

If I find something and I don't have it, yet, I download it.

What a weird question. I download music I like. Sometimes I buy stuff on Bandcamp or download from YT. I don't use Spotify and I'm an album/artist listener. Am I missing something here? Do people not have personal music libraries any more? Do people now just listen to whatever bullshit Spotify randomly plays? If so, that's sad.

I follow YT accounts that post music that I'm interested in such as Vapor Memory or Cryo Chamber. I'm also on the mailing lists of several artists on Bandcamp so I get notified of new releases. I ask friends for recommendations, I ask on forums, other places. Really not that hard.

bandcamp is awesome.

Usually go for More obscure rare stuff like video game sound tacks and underground lesser known artists that I find. Eventually, the top ones that pique my interest I will end up buying physical copies or purchased digital files because I wanna show My support.

"Now that's what I call music" I'm embarrassed to say, I use those volumes a lot to keep in touch with younger generations, new music. Also, among the more popular torrents generally, so download fast.