To be honest I simply find Tidal + Plex integration to be more convenient than piracy. I’ll pay my $10 per month for the ease of use and still buy an album or two per month from artists I want to support.
My discovery is a combination of Tidal and last.fm similar artists/recommendations and people on various forums. It’s one of the few things I still go back to Reddit for. The other thing is that I like to listen to a band’s full discography when I discover them. I recently found The Ocean and all 9 of their albums are solid. That’s a lot to buy.
Good that it works. I use a free tier of a streaming service for discovery, but I cannot imagine not having my actual collection I listen to the most often depend on a streaming service. You’re locked into only using their player, cannot use a dumb mp3 player at all, can lose all your collection if you’re in a situation when you’re unable to pay, and also the tracks you like might be gone because of copyright shenanigans. The on-disk DRM-less collection is just FAR more comfortable.
I’m not locked into their player. Tidal integrates through Plex and I manage my music library between Tidal and local files there. And again, I still buy albums but we’ve both acknowledged we can’t buy all the music we would listen to.
