Buying an album from e.g. Bandcamp is a better way to support a band than streaming their music on Spotify by literal orders of magnitude: https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/how-much-more-money-artists-e...

These days I listen to virtually all of my music from a Plex server containing all the music I've bought over the last few decades of my life. They have an app called Plexamp that brings almost all of the conveniences of Spotify to your local music collection (searching, streaming, offline downloads, smart playlists, auto artist mixes, etc.)

On the first Friday of every month (sometimes, but not always, "Bandcamp Friday") I buy a few more albums for the collection. I wind up spending more on music monthly than I would for a Spotify subscription, but not by a whole lot.

For the unaware: on Bandcamp Fridays, artists and labels get 100% of what you pay. You can see the schedule for the rest of the year here:

https://daily.bandcamp.com/features/bandcamp-fridays

https://isitbandcampfriday.com/

I've recently adopted this model (though I've been buying on the iTunes Store as it's DRM free and I have a hard time finding the larger or really tiny artists on band camp). Plexamp has been awesome and while I miss the discovery of Spotify, I am glad I left. I was a customer from 2012 to 2023 (11 years) which is kinda nuts when you think about it.

I release on Bandcamp, and then on streaming platforms slightly later, exept for Spotify which I never release on because they're awful. As a small comparison, for over 400k streams across all platforms, I've earned a grand total of €9.25. In the same time on Bandcamp, somewhere around €1k.

* Anything I make from my music gets donated to charity, so I'm obviously not in it for the money anyway.