Most of the discussion and sources of content talk about movies and series.
I’ve been recently looking for psy and techno music, finding FLAC or WAV with active seeders feels like striking gold. It’s definitely been a while since I’ve looked for active torrent sites and it feels more barren than ever.
Edit: Thank you all for all that valuable information. The reddit group really wasn’t this helpful and valued making fun over adding real use able knowledge.
Can’t. I’m addicted to the algorithms. Music discovery guided by AI is too much fun. If I was only using streaming services to listen to music I already know or the new albums from artists I already like them I’d be with you, but now I’m hooked on finding new stuff.
Funkwhale is federated. I have discovered lots of good stuff on there via other servers. Not algorithmic, but once you find a server that appeals to you, there’s a lot to dig into.
There’s also https://libre.fm and https://listenbrainz.org/ and https://openwhyd.org/
+1 to ListenBrainz. It’s an awesome tool for tracking your listening habits (kinda like Last.fm). Combined with Pano Scrobbler, I can create collage pics of my most listened-to artists or albums of a given time period (per week/month/year). It’s a great service and I want to donate to that project in the future, because I get so much value out of it.
“Guided by AI” I think you mean algorithms programmed according to strict music licensing contracts from the labels that say a service needs to suggest label-preferred “complimentary” artists over actual similar music that you would like based on a collection of characteristics in a given song/band’s sound signature.
You have evidence this is happening on Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist?
Richard Stallman wrote a quick page on the shady things Spotify does (3 minute read not counting the linked articles). Although only loosely related to what you asked for. According to the info I found online, Discover Weekly should be safe from the kinds of sponsorships you talk about (the whole article takes about 8-15 minutes to read, but I quoted the important part below).