I've been a professional musician since the end days of selling CDs, and I would like to say that having experienced the decline of CD sales because of piracy transition into the paid streaming era it's unambiguous that musicians were better off when mostly everyone was pirating and then some people bought CDs or other merch out of a desire to support vs today when everyone pays a nominal fee to a corporation that pays us nothing and also satisfies their desire to support despite not actually offering support.

I would much rather you pirate anything I have made or worked on vs listening on streaming services, which are an objective nightmare for musicians. Even if you never intend to spend a penny, normalizing piracy is better for us than normalizing the current capitalist-realism nightmare where you get whatever you want and also get to relax into the fiction that you aren't exploiting musicians because you pay the price of one album per month to a giant corporation so you can feel ok about it.

@clowncollege

I wish there was a way to pay musicians directly for music and bypass the corporate owners. So the actual artist / band, but also the people in the studio such as the recording technicians so in the case of say the Beatles, this would be rewarding them, George Martin, and the people directy involved in producing the music, oh and the people pressing the disks / media.

@zleap @clowncollege In the punk DIY scheme, you go to the band to pay. No middleman needed. Shows are usually cheap to attend and the band members are doing most of the work. Recording studios tend to be small affairs, usually run by some local band or band member. No rock stars involved. ;-)

Buying merch at the show or the band's website is the best way to support the bands.