Storage is cheap, and music (even in FLAC format) is small. You can fit tens of thousands of songs into a terabyte.

I download anything and everything. An artist I enjoy? Entire discography. I've only heard one song? Entire discography--there may be more I might enjoy! An artist in a genre I like but I've never heard? Entire discography.

I'm at over 125k songs, and I still feel like my collection is a sliver. I eventually want to reach 1m songs and truly become my own Spotify. Finding songs I've never heard before and that I end up loving in my own collection is a joy I can't describe.

If I like it I download it, save the whole album or discography. Archive everything. Never delete. Same for books and movies and shows, though I find myself watching less of those lately.

https://github.com/RandomNinjaAtk/arr-scripts/tree/main/lidarr downloads automatically. I don't really decide. I add artists when I see one missing.

It's more important to contribute to musicbrainz than to my library. If musicbrainz has it, I can dosnload it, if not, I can't download it either.

To everyone in here saying they download entire discographies, great! I agree. But the follow up question is how do you even find out about new (to you) artists that you might like? I've cross referenced the library I have (about 27k tracks) with the "similar artists" sections of Spotify, last.fm, etc, and I feel like I'm just going around in circles. All of the similar artists are just similar to each other and I have all of it already. How do you branch out?

If i like it.

I like a song from a artist so I download the entire catalog. Lossless where I can

Like other people, whole discographies. Artist URL straight into deemix and let it do it's thing.

For finding new music, I mostly rely on radiostations such as Kerrang! and YouTube subscriptions or recommendations.

MP3 320 is what I go for, I don't have the equipment to benefit from FLAC.

I set and forget too, never delete. You never know when it'll become impossible to get that data back if you want it.

bandcamp is awesome.

If I find something and I don't have it, yet, I download it.

Bandcamp has been pretty good for me to find the stuff I like listening to.

I use Spytify, so I "download" my songs real time in the background. If anything it makes me more intentional about what I do grab. Grabbing the entire discography of an artists may take a day, so a little pre-veting is necessary. you find out why some of the big names only have 1 or 2 hits out of a hundred, but you also find some great songs that didn't make it.

I'll usually aquire a few albums at a time. I'll give each song a quick pass (jumping to random parts) to determine the following

1. is the song awful and/or nothing like what the artist normally does = Delete.
2. is there dead space (a really long start/end of silence) or random talking/noises = trim
3. is it the volume stupidly loud/quiet compared to other songs = fix*
4. stupid rap section in the middle for no reason (thank god that trend is basically gone) = cut
5. what playlists does it belong in?

*I use MP3Gain for bulk volume adjustment, it does pretty good and is non-destructive, though not every player respects the adjustment (a tag in metadata or something)

I don't catch everything doing this, mostly because I spend a few seconds on each song, but it does filter out a lot.

Sometimes it takes a few listens to decide "I dont like this song" - delete.

I'm not a completionist (or try not to be) for albums/artists. If I don't like the song, its gone. If there's one part of a whole that I don't like, its chopped out.

Didn't know last fm was still around. I ditched them after they were breached. Musicbrainz is an apt alternative. I'm still bummed about how bad AI is at recommending similar songs /a artists. I'll grab random stuff and stuff from Musicbrainz recommendatiins. I definitely delete stuff I don't like, not for saving space but mainly just to keep my library tight. I also have nightmares about being in a coma and someone finding my music collection and thinking it's something I really like but really it's 80% garbage that I can't stand and they play it for me in a loop for weeks and I can't tell them to stop because of coma. I'm also pretty vocal in my life about not really liking country music, not because I want to be a judgemental jerk about it, but mainly because of the coma thing, and I want to make sure I'm not stuck listening to that in the coma.

I just download .MP3 or m4as of everything I add to my liked songs on Spotify. I pay for Spotify, but the offline functionality is bogus so I also keep regular copies of everything and don't rely on whatever dumbass propriety offline format Spotify uses because it never actually plays anything when offline that way.

Honestly i mostly download songs on .mp3 format individually.

Unless someone has been kind enough to compile the entire album on a .zip file

I just set up lidarr with all artists I like listening to and tell it to download everything they've made. That's how I have about 700gb of flac files

Listen to a song. I like the song. I download the song. It's not rocket science.

I add stations to my radio app, like Ancient FM, Cosmo Vintage, Intergalactic FM, King Dub, Nightwave Plaza, Radio Nova. Tons of cool stuff comes up, most is tagged. If I really like it I soulseek it. I stopped downloading whole albums by default, good tunes end up in my assorted folder. I throw out stuff I don't listen to as well, I'm not a hoarder.

I follow YT accounts that post music that I'm interested in such as Vapor Memory or Cryo Chamber. I'm also on the mailing lists of several artists on Bandcamp so I get notified of new releases. I ask friends for recommendations, I ask on forums, other places. Really not that hard.

"Now that's what I call music" I'm embarrassed to say, I use those volumes a lot to keep in touch with younger generations, new music. Also, among the more popular torrents generally, so download fast.

Download everything that would upset you if it were no longer available forever starting tomorrow.

Lately ive been getting a lot of new music from rateyourmusic.com . I look up an album i like, find some themed lists featuring it that aound interesting (a lot of the lists are like "things i listened to this year", i ignore those), and will hop from list to list as i see interesting looking albums.