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Comment by SeriousM | Hacker News Reader

Where do you get your music from? Back in the old days we used cd rips and sharing platforms to get the mp3s from but nowadays streaming got so convenient.

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I'm not the person you are replying to but ... I started buying CDs in 1985 to replace my vinyl collection. Around 2001 is when I ripped all my CDs (800 or so) to mp3, but I kept buying new CDs and ripping them up until CD players disappeared as a standard PC feature. I now buy mp3s from amazon or bandcamp or wherever.

Even though I have spotify, I prefer to listen to my own mp3s. The only time I use spotify is when someone says, "You should check out <band or album>". I'll listen to the album a few times on spotify, and if I like it, I will buy the album and then listen to my own mp3s.

As someone who uses foobar daily, I get my music mainly from the streaming platform Deezer. With the hi-fi subscription you get access to high quality audio and there are some unofficial tools that make it possible to download the flac files. It is super convenient for they have extensive metadata, album art and more recently lyrics as well. Occasionally I may download torrents but that is rare nowadays.

I also own physical copies for vast majority of the music that I download but I basically only buy them to support the artist and to read the booklet.

Bandcamp, traxsource, beatport, beatsource .. they all allow you to legally buy tracks in decent quality.

Soulseek never went away either

I mostly listen to my existing collection. Rarely when there is something new I like - music filesharing is still quite healthy. I still use Spotify on mobile, and for the recommendation engine, but the interface is bad and they don't have everything I listen to.

Sharings platforms still exist, they just get less mainstream exposure, for obvious reasons. They are also more exclusive and generally require more effort than back in the days.

It's still extremely simple to get music without having to put up with snobbish exclusive communities. Most basic solution is getting JDownloader and just copying a YouTube link with a song or playlist. If you want album releases, I could list half a dozen publicly accessible sites off the top of my head that don't require you to sign up and don't require you to beg somebody for an invite and don't require you to fulfill absurd seeding requirements.

I don't know where you get that snobbish vibe from (maybe my comment, in which case it wasn't intentional), but of course it's easy to just use yt-dlp or whatever. The places I frequent come with curation, organization, quality control and a community of people who deeply care about music which is something I value a lot.

Seeding, uploading and staying in it for the long haul is a lot more work than just buying a Spotify subscription and certainly not for everyone, but as someone who is constantly disappointed by the selection available on streaming services and also need local files for DJing, I couldn't imagine living without it.

I got the snobbish vibe from being in these communities and wasting my time on them. It's just another form of gatekeeping.

You do you. After the takedowns of its predecessors (Napster, Oink, What.cd) some quite literal gatekeeping is required IMO.

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