Bandcamp is another option. They have multiple download formats, including FLAC. Lately I've been seeing more albums from artists on ("major" indie) labels, not just self-released.

Bandcamp is my favorite service precisely because they include FLAC downloads.

This. I've started actually buying music for the first time ever because it sounds so good from Bandcamp.

Netflix offers too much value for a small amount plus the size of movies makes downloading/previewing the throwaway type of netflix shows make it hard to justify the effort to pirate.

Spotify always seems less useful compared to winamp if you knew what music you liked or like to download everything from one band who's best days are behind them. A hassle for new stuff but if you want the all of the 'yes' albums the rare shows, interviews spotify just doesn't cut it.

A happy medium for me is google play music. Basically the same song selection and features as spotify, plus the ability to upload your own mp3s that aren't available on the platform (I actually haven't used this feature in a while, but it seems like it still works). And you get ad-free youtube as well.

I am all about Youtube premium. Replaced my spotify with it and I love it. Ad free youtube, my own mp3s along with the google music catalog is great. They even grandfather people in on the original price that they subbed for when the service price increased.

They changed that last year though. An All Access subscription now only includes YouTube Music Premium, which does not remove ads. That requires a YouTube Premium subscription. Plus I hear there are plans to ditch Play Music for YouTube Music this year...

For me it's the opposite way around. Netflix's UK catalogue is tiny compared to the US, but Spotify always has the music I want. I pay for Spotify, but not Netflix.

A bit of a tangent, but the production quality and writing of shows on BBC iPlayer is high compared to Netflix. Netflix shows increasingly feel like they're written for a generic audience, with a lot of mediocre writing and, I hate to say it, a little dose of virtue signaling as well.

That might have been true a while back, but Netflix' US catalogue seems seriously small these days due to the fragmentation of video streaming in the US, and them focussing on their own original material (at least some of it is good).

Assuming you have Netflix and Prime Video, these days I'm finding more and more occasions when the selection in the UK is bigger (!).

I might give it another try

Not to neglect that traditional media for music can be found cheaply. I got something like 200 cds of great classical music from the relatives of a passed neighbor. Garage sales and such are great, too. They’re not great for newer music, but there are options.

I think a lot of people would be surprised how much music is available for free at their local public library.

I load up my holds list online on the weekend and pick up a dozen or so CDs one day a week on the way home from work.

Have you pirated in a while? Things like popcorntime make it trivial for even elderly people like my folks to check out new movies and shows. No longer are the days where you have to download the entire movie and hope it was a good copy you just click play and they start a progressive download from the beginnin and you can stream it within seconds. If it is a bad copy stop it and move on. I keep thinking about joining these services because it is nice to pay I believe people should get paid, but what Spotify is now doing is user hostile and now I am no longer considering joining. I use Adblock. I can not see how this will work for them. People surely will backlash.

ok well I bundle my media consumption with my phone service so on that hand it's not that problematic for me, but on the other hand I have netflix, paramount, cmore, viaplay, HBO nordic bundled as well as some cable channels and I would still have to pay another 30 dollars or so per month to get what I don't have now that I want

Use Kodi and plugins. Or rent good old DVDs for movies.

mp3s are compressed and lossy. Makes them unsuitable for buying. There are a few sites like bandcamp that sell flacs. Not sure why the big players don't let you buy flacs. It's not like there's an engineering issue. Maybe they get the rights only for lossy files.

Edit: Since some will invariably point out that you can't hear flacs, here's a better argument. Even if you prefer lossy music, there are and will be better codecs than mp3. So the choice of encoding should be up to you so that you can choose a better codec in the future if you wish. And mp3 wasn't even free until last year. So until 2018, it was illegal to play mp3s on a free system.

Then buy the CDs as if you can probably tell the difference. You're just making excuses for not wanting to pay.

Yep. At this point now there's so much paid music available in high quality than anyone who says that it's still not good enough is looking for reasons to feel better about themselves for not paying.

Video is something of a shitshow and I'm somewhat sympathetic to people who don't want to buy a DVD just because Netflix has driven all the local rental places out of business, their own catalog is rotting, and it's not available for even a la carte streaming. Or you have to subscribe to yet another streaming service just to watch one show.

But music? There may be corner cases but pretty much any of the big streaming services plus judicious a la carte purchases have you pretty well covered. Personally I do like owning music but then I started from a pretty large collection of physical media.

Anyone offering the complete collection of any artist including bootlags, unreleased tracks, artwork and in some cases images of used tickets of the shows?

If bootlegs and unreleased tracks were officially released, they would become official and released tracks.

If there's a specific unreleased track you want, fine, pirate that. I don't think there's anything wrong with pirating content that's not available for sale (as long as you buy it if/when it does become available for sale). However, the existence of some unreleased tracks do not give you license to pirate tracks which are released.

Outside of specific, exceptional circumstances, I have zero sympathy for anyone pirating music in 2018. Music is finally being distributed in the DRM Free, affordable, and unencumbered formats consumers have been asking for.

The problem is that if your tastes are not very conventional, the "exceptions" are half the cases, and you start to wonder why you bother.

A good example is Morphine's The Night. We're not talking about a bootleg record, it's a proper studio album owned by UMG. Yet it's not available on Spotify, Google Music or Amazon Music. It's on iTunes, but that requires installing a native app, which doesn't run on any of my devices, including the most popular OS in the world (Android). Alternatively I can buy a CD, which will cost me something like $50 with shipping, and rip it myself - and that's only because I still happen to own a desktop with a CD drive.

Just a FYI if you buy music from iTunes you get DRM free files that you play pretty much anywhere. It's how I get all my music on my Android phone.

Yeah, but I don't have anywhere to run iTunes :/

c’mon, ur on haxxor news and u cant run a windows vm? there’s a free image on microsoft’s homepage, and I bet you’ll manage to get itunes working and transfer the music within the free trial period.

Sure, but don't you see the absurdity? I have to download and install VirtualBox, download a full Windows VM image, download and install iTunes on it, create an account, create a virtual credit card, register it on the account, purchase the album, and then copy the files out of the VM.

All so that the artists get about $1 from my $10.

Or I can download a torrent and give those $10 to Vapors of Morphine on their Bandcamp page, which is much easier for me and will net them about $8 instead.

So fuck the leeches, I'll keep pirating.

Amazon has it for cheap.

https://www.amazon.com/Night-Morphine/dp/B000046PUL

It's not cheap once you account for the typical 100-200% in cross-Atlantic shipping charges.

It's important to keep the piracy channel alive. Right now you may feel you have choices and options but there are a handful of players who can sell you everything. 2020 may not be as great.

If the media we purchase today is DRM Free, it will be easy to distribute when and if the legal channels disappear.

Having easy-accessible piracy channels now works against that goal by incentivizing content providers to invest in more stringent DRM schemes. DRM can rarely prevent piracy completely, of course, but it can make piracy more difficult and less accessible.

DRM never stopped piracy and DRM affected paying customers and drove them toward piracy makincg it more accissible (more people sharing bigger hive). The effect is not the cause in this case.

a well-encoded mp3, ogg, or aac file will be audibly transparent to almost every end user, even on extremely high-end equipment. mp3 does have the side benefit of being supported on damn near everything.

For me it's not about lossless sounding better. Storage is so cheap nowadays that it's silly not to have a full lossless encode for an archive/backup. I can transcode that lossless file into any other lossy format but transcoding a lossy file to another format destroys the quality.

It feels, for some-odd reason that us audio people have to justify our purchasing decisions and desire for quality and fidelity way more than people who spend hundreds of dollars on 21 inch 144hz monitors and care about things like frame rate and texture resolution do.

Or maybe not, but it's a feeling.

Enthusiasts complain about the crappy latency and refresh rates of modern LCD televisions all the time, against people saying "just turn on motion smoothing and most people won't notice." I'm not justifying one or the other, but it happens in both domains.

I suppose I'm glad I offered the caveat that it was a 'feeling', in that case.

It's pretty easy to learn to recognize mp3 pre-echo and no amount of good encoding will eliminate it.

Doesn’t Tidal offer very high quality streams?

As for iTunes, don’t they sell in high bitrate AAC? It is very hard to hear a difference in the vast majority of music between a high bitrate AAC and an uncompressed file.

For recent releases they tend to be available, but you might have to look through many channels: next to Bandcamp Beatport, Qobuz, Juno Download, Bleep, Boomkat are stores I check.

Spotify isn't streaming FLACs either.

And you're not paying $1/track for Spotify.