I don't like any band enough to give them my credit card details directly, and neither should you.

I don't trust or like PayPal enough to give them my credit card details or money and neither should you ;)

Why? I've never heard of them being any trouble for customers, indeed their reputation is that they're extremely friendly to the end customer (will give you a refund no questions asked, never dispute chargebacks, ...).

Agreed, all the horror stories I’ve heard have been from sellers, not buyers. What am I missing?

Having your account locked out of the blue with no reason given, where paypal seizes your funds and the onus is on you to call them and spend many hours / weeks / months to get back your money.

Even if you never have funds on your account, suddenly getting banned means forgoing the use of paypal ever again with that card / address / name, unless you sort it out.

"Don't buy things using PayPal, otherwise there's a risk that you'll be banned from PayPal and won't be able to buy things using PayPal"

As the poster above points out, that sounds like seller concerns. I use paypal as a way to help anonymize my credit card so as a buyer I never worry about having funds in there. But it does sound like it's bad for sellers.

You're missing that you are fuelling half of the equation and letting the people that your are trying to pay deal with the bad half.

If a band has decided to accept PayPal then they've presumably decided the downsides are worth it to them. So saying that you'd rather not support the band at all than pay them via PayPal seems... paternalistic to say the least.

Random account closures, bad support, legally questionable behavior (e.g. they've had to be sued about illegal parts of their ToS a few times), making it difficult to recover account balance from them, ... And when "extremely friendly to end customers" gets to "regularly fucks over small sellers", that's also something not everybody wants to support.

The rules of the major card networks will protect you against card-not-present fraud, so I don't understand the worry. Some countries might even have laws that strengthen these protections further, though it might only be limited to credit cards.

You get your money back eventually, sure, but it's a lot of hassle to go through.

I never used paypal on bandcamp, and I use to support bands from there. Credit is an option that usually works

Sadly Bandcamp pays out via PayPal, so however you pay the artist can only receive their cut through PayPal.

Why do you dislike PayPal so much?

can't talk for OP, but they got a 10 year boycott from me because of this : https://wikileaks.org/PayPal-freezes-WikiLeaks-donations.htm...

More stories about PayPal: https://web.archive.org/web/20191011190010/https://minifree.....

PayPal has a reputation for shutting long time customers out suddenly and without any explanation.

Paypal has a long history of freezing accounts and leaving funds in limbo.