On this thread: https://piefed.social/post/1243539 one of the main points of contention is about the tension between how spotify pays artists very little, but piracy doesn’t, on it’s own, pay them at all.
I’m a heavy user of bandcamp, but i know that it has strengths and weaknesses: it’s great for finding independent artists and small labels, but it doesnt have a big catalog for popular tracks.
Do people have experience with other sources for purchasing? What about https://us.7digital.com/ ?
Specifically for self hosting, is there a way to streamline purchases from sites like these into lidarr? If not, is there an automated solution for (1) uncompressing a downloaded archive file from a purchase, then (2) making it conform to a file/folder organizational structure, and (3) having navidrome, jellyfin, etc import it?
Just trying to find workable ideas for owning music and getting artists most of the money.


I just set up Navidrome in my lunch break and am looking into exactly this. I hadn’t downloaded/organized my last Bandcamp purchases and now I have 32 zip files on my laptop and am wondering how to get them properly tagged and sorted in the existing library.
I’m rereading this article by @nfreak@lemmy.ml and it seems like beets could be an answer, but I don’t fully understand what exactly it does yet.
I’ve just started using beets for organizing my collection. It’s relatively easy once you get the hang of it. Ease I suppose differs based on how organised/tagged your collection is currently.
Beets can organize your music library. It uses musicbrainz IDs to identify songs and albums, it can move/copy the files into folders. You can also convert files right away. I created additional mp3 files and moved Thema into a separate folder for use on my phone to save space.
There are plugins to normalize the volume. Loads of dstuff. You just have to set up a config file to your needs and you are good to go.
Beets is one solution, and I also recommend taking a look at Musicbrainz Picard. It’s a more graphical and user friendly way (though more manual) to identify, organize, tag, and sort music into a preferred format. It’s what I use on all my Bandcamp purchases to clean up metadata and add things like lyrics before it automatically throws it into the right folder