Bandcamp, even though it's ownership is questionable at this point, still has Bandcamp Fridays where the artist gets 100% of the sale, and they let you download DRM-free high quality FLAC files.

This is for all those who don't like this, and want to demand DRM-free files.

[–] SweetCitrusBuzz@beehaw.org 3 points 17 hours ago

For mainstream things there is 7digital, qobuz and a few others where you can get drm free files including flac most of the time.

[–] alsaaas@lemmy.dbzer0.com 23 points 1 day ago (1 children)

sometimes, especially with niche artists, there aren't that many high quality flacs out there in the first place

[–] LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Yeah, the one thing that keeps me on spotify

[–] oldfart@lemm.ee 2 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

You find niche artists on Spotify? Not my experience at all, anything even slightly non-mainstream I could not find.

[–] LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 6 hours ago

Yeah, tbh Spotify has massively diversified my music taste and even more than that introduced me to literally hundreds of artists I've come to really enjoy.

I don't use the home tab or any public playlists, I make my own playlists out of music featuring my faves, usually grouped by genre or vibe or for highly personal stuff to specific times and events in my life, like an old mixtape of sorts, then I'll see what's suggested at the bottom and check those songs out. If I really like it I might listen to more by the same artist or the album the song is from but I've never been huge on albums as a medium specifically.

It used to be a few years back that almost all the suggestions were spot on, maybe even better than Google Play Music used to be, but much more effective than the tried and true method of googling "artist/album/song like x".

A lot of the artists I found that way only have a couple hundred or thousand monthly listeners, if that.

Though lately the recs haven't been very good.

[–] alsaaas@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 day ago

I usually go with Bandcamp, SoundCloud and YouTube (latter two in rare cases) downloads when I can't find it as a Torrent or on Soulseek (using Nicotine +)