I am also an avid band camp user and will buy as much as I can afford times being what they are though that is less and less so I have to prioritise what I want to pay for.

The music I am into also releases a lot of things as vinyl only which is utter bullshit IMO so I will pirate the shit out of any of that I can get my hands on as I won’t pay for a giant piece of obsolete media that I then have no way to actually use xD

I pay for premium for my sister and niece on a family plan thing anyway so it isn’t like I would save any money by not using it as it is there and paid for regardless. I’m literally ripping the music from Spotify using soggfy.

I use soulseek as well which is fine but a lot of idiots on there lock their files away which goes against the very nature of piracy imo, using this Spotify method is often easier to get some of the things I want and then I can tag them using my desired naming convention too rather than having to clean up other peoples messy as fuck tags.

Paying for it helps me pirate even more efficiently. I often leave 20+ hour playlists on ripping the music I want whilst off doing other things.

I have compared the 320 mp3s I get from it with 320’s that I have bought using spek and they were literally identical and whilst having a flac is nice having money to pay my bills is nicer and the difference in sound quality really isn’t that noticeable without a proper system to play them through.