I'm not above piracy if there's no DRM free option (or if the music is very old or the artist is long dead), but I still believe in supporting artists who actively support freedom.
Even better though, is a P2P service that is censorship resistant.
But yeah I like Bandcamp plenty.
> artists who actively support freedom.
The bluegrass world is quickly becoming this.
At its core is a corpus of traditional songs which have been handed down across generations, especially Irish fiddle tunes and West African banjo music.
The concepts of digital freedom trace multiple clear lineages to this tradition of music. For example, John Perry Barlow, who founded The Electronic Frontier Foundation, The Freedom of The Press Foundation, and participated heavily in discussions on The WELL which laid the cryptological groundwork that eventually became blockchains, was a member of The Grateful Dead (who, while more of a rock or country band than a traditional string band, stewarded and celebrated this corpus of music across several decades) and was himself an aficionado of the history of IP-unencumbered music.
If you see the word "Traditional" on a bluegrass setlist (usually listed next to a song where an author normally goes), it effectively means "I assert that this song is not subject to intellectual property."
I need to revisit this in the next few weeks as I release my second record (which, if I may boast, has an incredible ensemble of most of my favorite bluegrass musicians on it; it was a really fun few days at the studio).
Currently I do pin all new content to IPFS and put the hashes in the content description, as with this video of Drowsy Maggie with David Grier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTI1HoFYbE0
Another note: our study of Drowsy Maggie was largely made possible by finding old-and-nearly-forgotten versions in the Great78 project, which of course the industry attempted to sue out of existence on an IP basis. This is another example of how IP is a conceptual threat to traditional music - we need to be able to hear the tradition in order to honor it.
...which is more important / needed than ever. I encourage every who asks to get my music from bit torrent instead of spotify.