It probably depends on the genre, for metal, almost everything is on bandcamp. The main exceptions are some very old, some very poppy nuclear blast/napalm record stuff, or generally Japanese bands which mostly seem to not care about non-Japanese fans in general.

I buy about 1-2 albums a week from bandcamp.

> Places like Band camp have very small collections.

Really ? My bandcamp collection is big and my BC wish list is huge... so much good stuff there.

I'm afraid there aren't a lot of places that are fair to artists outside bandcamp.

Qobuz sells popular music in 24bit flac. Bleep and Boomkat sell more obscure stuff.

Your best bet is thrift/charity stores and ripping CDs. Super cheap and plentiful and albums are still put out on CDs.

To benefit the artist its usually better to pirate the music and buy some merch.

Interesting, do you have a source for this?

It depends on the artist and their contracts of course, but for normal (non-indie) artists with labels, this is well-known and you can read all about it all over the internet.

Generally, most bands make most of their money from touring, both from ticket sales and especially from merchandise (T-shirts etc.). They don't normally make much from CDs, and very little from streaming, that mostly goes to the label.

So if you really want to support an artist, go to their concert and buy a t-shirt. If a concert isn't convenient, you can probably buy a t-shirt from their website. This will do a lot more for their personal finances than worrying about copyrights.

Personally, though, I do like to buy CDs of artists I follow, and I normally rip my music in FLAC from those. A lot of the CDs these days are quite nice, with cool books sometimes.

beatport, beatsource, traxxsource, bandcamp. I think iTune store has 256kb/s AAC wich should be equal or better to high quality mp3. And I believe amazon music is similar.

Amazon Music has 256 kbps VBR MP3s

Ah, good to know. Thanks.

Beatport is the other place I buy from. Unfortunately if it's not on bandcamp or beatport the only remaining place is itunes.

Qobuz has an extensive online shop for music.

True, but they are pricey ($25+ USD for an album), and force you to choose between hi-res (24 bit FLAC) and CD quality, instead of purchasing rights to a song and offering MP3 as well.

I have an extensive MP3 collection, favorite albums I try to keep FLAC, while others I'm fine with MP3/320 or for stuff I collect but don't listen to all the time, VBR 256 is fine to keep size small.

Have you done an abx test on what you would consider bad mp3 from a "regular" store and the flac version?

You can still buy music from iTunes, not sure what formats you can download but AFAIK it's DRM-free these days