Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

I felt the same, but there's just things that's forever popular. I don't mind not seeding, if there's already 200+ doing it.

But for all the niche things, and for personal favorites, I'll seed for a loooong time.

For popular stuff I stop seeding when I've uploaded 10x the download size. For other stuff I keep it uploading forever.

Soulseek is a P2P file sharing system centered around music in particular. It's pretty direct. Unlike a torrent where you'll have multiple seeds for a single source, you're connecting directly to other individuals for the content. It generally operates under the expectation that you're also sharing something, and some users may opt not to allow downloads to people who do not also allow downloads from themselves. The downside to this system is you may need to wait for that person to come online before you can start a download, while with a torrent, other seeders can fill that gap.

It's survived as a pretty big platform for music hoarders to source hard to find material, but it's so dead simple to use and it has a quick and reliable search. Nothing secretive about it, it's basically just another P2P network that has more in common with Napster than the Pirate Bay

Use nicotine as the client instead. It's arguably more user friendly and also stuffed with features. Most nix distros have it in their repos. You just need to share stuff on Soulseek(primarily music though some people share films as well).

Soulseek is filled to the brim with music, especially flac versions of songs.

It's pretty easy to use. The only challenge for newcomers is setting up port-forwarding, since some users won't share their collection with people who have their ports blocked. You don't have to open your ports or share your music collection, but it is leeching and considered a dick move by some.

I can rly recommend it, especially with Nicotine+

You’ll find the rarest shit on SLSK.

From what I understand the (Japanese) band official wrote the band name with the Latin alphabet. The band had a slight international presence in France if I'm not mistaken with their 2nd last album getting a limited CD release, so maybe a pirate site catering more to the Japanese or French crowd might have yielded better results in hindsight.

I dunno if I would consider the band that launched gackt as niche but I might be living in a bubble of my own making haha

Private trackers are not worth it at all. Getting into main stuff is way too hard and open signups are pure luck. Even people who used top tier private trackers for over a decade now openly admit they wouldn't bother with it if they were starting from scratch today.