yt-dlp

I personally have been trying to setup a music library just for my ipod classic, and no matter what I do I keep finding duplicate songs. I also plan to self host my music library to access from my phone when I don’t have my ipod, but first I want to get rid of dupes which makes this so frustrating.

Public libraries often have CDs tout can borrow.

The answer to your question of why it’s so hard to give artists your money is exactly the same as it has been for ages for all media. The few companies who survived the consolidation of the industry have done everything in their power to make sure they are the gatekeepers of content. They buy and merge or kill off any competing companies or technologies.

They weren’t successful with MP3s or with streaming because they didn’t bother to understand the technology or that the Internet was the new marketplace and thought they could just do what they had done with physical media and pay for laws that protected their interests and sue everyone, but they ultimately lost control because you can’t sue hundreds of millions of people like you can sue a few thousand stores. So they had to give the people what they wanted for a while so they could have time to buy up all of the companies.

But they’ve now done that and paid enough to get the laws and precedents on interpreting those laws that they wanted, so courts are becoming better at enforcing those laws more quickly. So they can pressure new tech that pushes the limits on interpreting the laws to not last long enough to get people hooked. And now that they’ve reconsolidated most of the market and technologies as capitalism tends to do if you’re patient enough and there’s no possibility of monopoly regulation or market disruption, we’re stuck with pirate or use the garbage they feed to us and most artists are back to having to sign their art away and sleep with executives to get the marketing and distribution from the gatekeepers just to get a chance at success. The rest have to rely on word of mouth and self distribution which even online can be expensive without the advantages of centralized hosting providers, merchant accounts, and bandwidth.

I don’t buy music like I used to, but when I do it’s probably a CD from the artists site, or something like nugs.net that usually have several lossless download formats. I listen to mostly live music these days though, so anything else is probably on etree or archive.org.

Bandcamp is still OK for me and I listen to some fairly obscure stuff.

Just to offer a heads up - there’s a new solution/site which is currently in Beta but is backed by good people (musicians). It needs an influx of music diversity (lots of metal at the moment) but if it gets that when it comes out of beta then it could very well be a good Bandcamp replacament - Ampwall

i host a funkwhale pod and load content to it off qobuz and deezer.

Maybe it’s because of what I listen to but I can generally find it on on Bandcamp, Soulseek or torrent trackers.

I’ll be honest and say that most of my self hosted music collection was pirated or ripped from CD like 20 years ago. I put it all on an iPod back then.

I found the iPod gathering dust in a drawer when I finally got a car with a usb jack a couple years ago (yeah I’m not exactly laden with bags of cash over here) and recently pulled all that music back onto my newly set up media server.

I have a Spotify family account I’m trying to phase out with resistance from the children.

To support artists I go and see them when they tour and buy a ludicrously expensive t-shirt

bandcamp and piracy are still the main routes. try to look at the artist’s soundcloud too for links to what they use. some genres (like trance for me) still heavily use soundcloud

If I can, I buy direct downloads.

If I can’t do that, I’ll buy the CD (as long as its direct or a small label).

If I can’t, or its one of the big labels, I’ll find it elsewhere. I’d rather buy merch to support the artist directly than buy anything that goes through the big labels.

Pirate the music and send $20 to the artists venmo

Jellyfin, I host all my media there. And Symfonium as a player getting media from Jellyfin.

I’m in a fairly similar boat. I like to pay for music and buy any album I like on vinyl. I used to rely on the digital download codes that came with them to build my collection, but few come with download codes nowadays.

I used to mostly use bandcamp for things I wasn’t getting on vinyl or that came without a download code, but it’s getting harder. I’m somewhat active in my local music scene and managers tell me it’s a lot of pain for not much revenue, particularly with so few people buying stuff they make available there.

So I’m back to relying on CDs again. I don’t particularly mind — it’s still cheap enough that it’s worth it to have a lossless rip, and the clutter isn’t a huge bother.

I’m certainly not going to ever go back to commercial streaming services though. Staying in control of my own stuff is always going to be my overriding priority.

I am in a similar boat. Since you have Tidal might want to look into Tidal-dl to “backup” the things you especially like in high quality.

Tidal is actually not too bad, and it pays artists more than other services (not a lot, just more) but I do expect it to go downhill/away eventually so I make a habit of downloading what I can and supporting the artist directly in other ways.