I find it depressing that there seem to be only two ways to distribute media and manage one's audio collection: Either ultra-convenient but fully locked down streaming services - or analog "vintage" media like vinyl or cassettes, which do give you a physical medium under your full control, but also require you to forego all the progress we made with digital media.

The one thing that's absent: Plain old audio files that you can store on your hard drive and copy to your phone or other devices.

Edit: Ok, there are still more options left than I thought. I take that back then :)

I only buy archival (flac) downloadable files. Some places I've purchased music from..

- https://bandcamp.com/ - https://us.7digital.com/ - https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/shop

If I can't find them there I will grab the audio off youtube or hit the torrents. Used to buy CDs and rip them, but those are getting hard to find (and it was a PITA).

syncthing is a very useful utility for this. just install it on 2 devices, add a folder, then the files will sync over the network whenever both devices are on.

if you have an old phone or laptop lying around gathering dust you can set up syncthing on that and have it act as the always-on server. something simple like a raspberry pi with an external drive would do either.

every syncthing folder has a .ignore file where you can add patterns to reduce the overall size of the folder, which can be useful if youre going to try and sync your music library to your phone. its very basic but it can be useful in some cases. like adding *.flac would ignore all .flac files and only sync .mp3 does. or maybe if you have a few artists with very large folders you could ignore them and sync the rest. i havnt found a good solution to that problem yet tbh

I regularly buy full albums and individual tracks on the Apple Store. AFAIK Amazon also still offers the same, both stores are DRM free

Bandcamp is huge

I buy music either on bandcamp or iTunes, both of which gives me DRM free audio files. I then store them locally.

As far as I know Apple will still sell you individual tracks (DRM free, I think?), though it’s a bit hidden.