direct from the artists whenever possible, Bandcamp, Patreon, merch and physical media, gigs when possible. lots of smaller artists are on bandcamp because it seems reasonably well run, pays the artists fairly (especially on "bandcamp friday" sale days, where the artist gets 100% of the revenue)

if you have contact details for an artist contact them directly, dont give them your life story or act like a crazy stalker, just say hi, explain you prefer to buy music directly when possible and you dont want to support companies like Spotify. This method is mainly for niche music and new artists that struggle to find audiences in the traditional algorithm based machine but it doesn’t hurt to try.

I'll download music from Soulseek (and I share TBs of it too) when all else fails, or in a try before you buy type of arrangement.

Others have alrwady mentioned bandcamp, but far from every artist is on there.

I used to buy my music from 7digital, but they were bought by a shitty company, and also have not responded to questions about albums I bought that are no longer in my library.

So now I use Qobuz. They're a streaming service, but they have a separate download store you buy stuff from without a subscription.

I download most of my music with slskd which uses the soulseek network. And I try to support as many artists as I can by purchasing merch.

I mostly get music from Bandcamp. They have a pretty big library, but it's mostly newer and independent bands on there. You won't find, like, the beatles or taylor swift.

Sometimes I'll buy stuff directly from bands, if it's not on bandcamp, via their store or label or whatever. I used to get CDs, too, and rip them, but I haven't done that in a while.

All purchased download music is pretty much drm free, wish other forms of media were without having to sail the high seas.

I do Bandcamp where I can but end up just yt-dlping YouTube and SoundCloud where necessary, and then I try to ask those artists to put their music in bandcamp or somewhere I can buy a download.

I just bought from Bandcamp last Friday cause it was a special day where all proceeds go straight to the artist. I made a neat little list of artists I wanted to look for on there, and most were on Bandcamp. Of the ones that weren't I think it was mostly because they're Japanese, so there's probably some other platform that they sell digital albums on rather than Bandcamp (Discogs was one of them).

You can download your music in multiple formats. The only thing that sucks is you have to download each album individually as far as I know. Some artists offer their entire discography in a bundle that's cheaper than individually buying each album, but do check if some of those songs aren't available for download anymore.

For me, I care most about having a working product and ethically consuming music as much as I can (afford lol), so the downloads and stuff is just quality of life things for me. I'm happy with my purchases and eagerly planning out a list of my next choices for September's Bandcamp Friday.

Also you can apparently stream on Bandcamp but i just selfhost a Navidrome and use that.