I’m not on any streaming service, I like to buy and store my own music.
Used to be you went to iTunes and just bought what you wanted, but now the online stores seem pretty fragmented. Went to search for Studio Ghibli music and only YouTube 10hr misses show up.
Is there still a consistent way to get music, or are we stuck with shopping 10 sites in the hopes one has it?
for anything remotely hard to find (which japanese music can be due to licensing hell), i usually use discogs to buy physical CDs and rip the music myself for my library. i’m not particularly sure that there’s many digital marketplaces that really satisfy my needs.
I just hunt for the CDs
Valid points, and I should start ripping again for sure. New wrench thrown in…what about small artists only using Spotify? I’m thinking of sub/unsub just to playout the songs into my audio rec and manually do Metadata, but would love a more legit option lol.
are they not on bandcamp or a similar platform? i don’t use spotify but i don’t imagine artists would be exclusive to a streaming platform. i often buy music from smaller artists on bandcamp (digital or physical if they have the merch for it).
I like to look for physical CDs locally, but my taste in music doesn’t fit that purchasing option. When I buy online, I first try to see if there is a physical CD option. After that, I look at Bandcamp, then MP3s from Amazon, and finally iTunes (harder to use since my daily computer runs Linux). It’s definitely frustrating finding an artist you like and discovering part or none of their music is available for purchase.
Deezer is a french Spotify, it has pretty much the same library. It used to be that you could download their entire datacenter of FLACs with a free account lol. I think it’s still doable with a paid account, with tools like deezloader/deemix, but iirc the main dev gave up after Deezer sunset the creation of free accounts entirely. It was all open source, so probably someone picked it up, but idk where to point, I didn’t keep up with the projects.
For actually supporting the artists… I think this is how Patreon got started, it was a tool the founders themselves needed because it was too hard to support creators before that.
I mention that Deezer’s french because they actually have a “copy tax”, they expected people would rip CDs and share files. Good times.
Spotify is free (with ads that my friends swear don’t show up when playing in a browser. At worst you hear them between songs, they don’t have mid-rolls).
Yeah, unfortunately some artists are only on Spotify when they’re starting out, I keep bugging them to release on Bandcamp though.
I keep forgetting about iTunes store since they’re pushing the streaming side so hard these days, AND I don’t have iTunes on my computer, and I haven’t really tried Amazon yet. Very frustrating when I want to support an artist but can’t.
I buy what I can on CD/Vinyl, then try to go Bandcamp where I can
I don’t buy music much, but when I do, it’s either Bandcamp or iTunes.