Grandson's most recent album (INERTIA) is really good. Violence by Kid Kapichi is a banger too. WHO'S THE ENEMY from Grandson is very very good and has Bob Vylan on it.
The Ballað of The Broken Birdie Records by múm is my personal pick. It's pretty dark but extremely soft which makes for a very cathartic experience in my opinion.
Michał addresses his problems with relying on donations later on in the post. Dayjobs are the main source of burnout but devs need it to survive. It's very difficult for a FOSS project to get enough consistent funding to pay a liveable wage for even one dev without compromising on some aspects to gain funding. And even if they do, the FOSS work now becomes the dayjob and becomes a source of burnout. Ontop of this, donations are extremely unstable and there's no guarantee a project will be able to pay a dev enough every year.
I'm not really worried about whether a label or corporation deems me to have the "right" to listen to their music. The only thing I'm concerned with outside of consuming the art is the artist who made it. I highly doubt any artist would genuinely care if someone pirated their music but still payed them through other means (like buying merch, tickets, etc).
I think the argument of who gets paid what when you buy merch is irrelevant when you consider the alternative being the artist gets virtually nothing. I would have to listen to an artist 200 times for them to maybe get a singular dollar from spotify. If whoever is handling their merch store is giving them less than that for each sale of a shirt then it's the artists fault at that point for still working with them.
Personally I do this by buying merch. If I buy a shirt from a band than not only do I get a cool shirt but the band also gets paid more in that single transaction than if I listened to their music 5000 times on spotify.
I've found the best way to check for leaks with torrenting is by using ipleak.net. They have a feature which will tell you the address it sees you torrenting from. Super handy.
I've heard of Dark Castle as Stevie Floyd is the now ex-wife of Jef Whitehead who's my favorite musician period. I haven't actually listened to any of their stuff though, maybe I should give them a try?
Hoopla seems okay for people who listen to a lot of mainstream stuff. I've never actually heard about it before now or used it so everything I say is just coming straight out my ass, but, it seems their library is very limited. Orpheus has a very extensive library with almost everything on there having a lossless flac version. It's still nothing compared to Soulseek, but as long as you're into bands/artists with more than 5 listeners in their lifetime, you'll be able to find everything. It all just comes down to what you're looking for though.
For a lot of people, it's a community thing. I'm a member on Orpheus and they have a lot of great community stuff like Album of the Month, user made scripts, tutorials, forums, etc. They can also have a lot higher quality content and moderation because they're so "exclusive". And, for music, a private tracker is gonna be 100x better than a public one or Soulseek.
Yeah, just make sure you read up on the study material and understand it all well enough. I believe they hold interviews during the weekends and the wait times vary throughout the weekend but for me I had to wait about 3 or 4 hours before getting an interview.
Grandson's most recent album (INERTIA) is really good. Violence by Kid Kapichi is a banger too. WHO'S THE ENEMY from Grandson is very very good and has Bob Vylan on it.