I miss that site; it wasn't really a "private torrent tracker", it was a music community. I discovered entire genres of music I never knew existed on what.cd.
Spotify is what.cd's mentally handicapped little brother in comparison.
Spotify recommendations are good sometimes but it really lacks the strong sense of community. There's no personal touch to Spotify recommendations.
And for entire new things it tends to gravitate towards the more popular "classic $genre" stuff within a genre. That doesn't mean it's bad music, but a jazz playlist with John Coltrane and Louis Armstrong isn't really very interesting, nor is a metal playlist with Metallica and Iron Maiden. The thing that what.cd offered was that you could discover things beyond that.
And all of this is so subjective in the first place. I recently watched all of the Alien films, and I felt the third Alien film is the second-best (after the original), but the "rating sites" have it listed as the lowest-rated of all of them. I'm probably not the only one who likes the film more than the ratings would suggest, and this kind of stuff gets lost in these algorithmic recommendation systems.
Then this user not only finds it in flac, but is able to create a torrent, upload it and shared it in under 90 seconds. It still boggles my mind how he pulled it off.
I don't believe in magic, but this was magical lol
It's their site, they can do what they want with it. And I can have my opinions on the petty bureaucraticness.
Maybe try this :)