The author says they buy the albums.

"Moving away from Spotify doesn't mean abandoning artists. In fact, I now support musicians more directly by:

Purchasing music directly from platforms like Bandcamp where artists receive 82-90% of sales Buying physical media from official stores Supporting Patreon/subscription services for favorite artists Attending concerts and buying merchandise Buying a $10 album on Bandcamp puts about $8.20-$9.00 in the artist's pocket. To match that on Spotify, you're talking roughly 1.6k-3k streams of that album per listener. If the artist has a label taking a cut on Spotify, the stream counts needed go up further.

My self-hosted setup is about controlling my listening experience and owning what I pay for, not avoiding fair compensation to artists."

I assumed a lot of that was a disclaimer to try and avoid encouraging illegal activity outright.

Lidarr seems to be a cornerstone of the setup. I assume Bandcamp is for more obscure indie stuff that isn't as available from the pirates.

Lidarr isn't just for piracy, it's a good tool for keeping your library organised.

It does musicbrains matching, fixes the metadata based on that, fetches pretty pictures of the artist etc.

There are other tools for it, but Lidarr is what works for me.

They specifically mention: lidarr is connected to sabnzbd. They add 'to download music I bought' but I find that very hard to believe.

Since when do sites like band camp etc expose your bought library over usenet?

He is implying that he only downloads music from usenet that he purchased in some form somewhere else. Whether that is any less illegal, I don't know.

Artists no longer make money from selling music. They make money from live performances, or niche products like vinyl records/merch. But from streaming services? Not really.

Live performances also have the added benefit of shielding artists from AI music.