The Ultimate Guide to Finding and Downloading Music

I've talked about my music hoarding obsession a few times on this blog. I wrote an iOS music player from scratch because none of the existing ones did what I wanted. I analyzed four years of Spotify listening data to figure out what I'd been listening to before I started keeping track myself. I navigated two Chinese apps I couldn't read a word of to download an album with fewer than two thousand lifetime streams. At this point it's less of a hobby and more of a condition.

This is the guide I wish I'd had when I started. A proper flowchart for finding and downloading music, covering everything from songs still available on streaming all the way to tracks that are genuinely on the verge of being lost forever.

Step 1: It's still on streaming

This is the easy case. If a song is available on Spotify or Apple Music, it's almost certainly available on other streaming platforms too. They all pull from the same distributors.

For downloading, you have a few options depending on what you're working with.

If you have a premium account on Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, Tidal, or similar, OnTheSpot is your best bet. It's a desktop app that interfaces directly with the streaming service's API and lets you download tracks, albums, and playlists cleanly.

If you don't have a premium account anywhere, Lucida used to be the go-to for pulling from basically every streaming platform. It's still usable, but honestly I'd only recommend it for SoundCloud at this point. Everything else has gotten more restrictive.

The best option right now, premium account or not, is Monochrome. It's a Tidal interface that doesn't require a subscription, and it lets you download music in any quality from 128kbps all the way up to Dolby Atmos. No other tool comes close in terms of convenience right now. TIDAL's catalog is also comprehensive enough that if a song is on any major streaming platform, it's almost certainly on Tidal too. Start here.

Step 2: Delisted, but not hard to find

Songs get pulled from streaming all the time. Labels and artists delist things for all kinds of reasons: catalog disputes, rebrands, licensing issues, personal decisions. But being gone from Spotify doesn't mean it's gone from everywhere.

The first places to check are YouTube, SoundCloud, and Bandcamp. All three tend to accumulate archives of delisted music, especially from artists with dedicated fanbases. Fan reuploads, archive accounts, and official uploads that predate the delisting are all common.

If the song is on SoundCloud, Lucida handles the download fine. If it's on YouTube, yt-dlp is the only tool you need. It downloads in the highest available quality and handles basically every edge case YouTube throws at it. Bandcamp typically has direct download options built into the page, assuming the artist made them available.

Step 3: The Soulseek network

If YouTube, SoundCloud, and Bandcamp come up empty, the next stop is Soulseek.

Soulseek is a peer-to-peer file sharing network built specifically around music. It's been around since 2000 and has developed into one of the best archives of rare, underground, and hard-to-find music on the internet. Unlike general-purpose torrenting, Soulseek is populated almost entirely by people who are genuinely passionate about music: collectors, archivists, people who ripped their CD collections years ago and left them up. The quality of what you'll find there is often surprisingly high.

The way it works: you connect to a central server, search for what you want, and then transfer files directly between you and whoever has it. No centralized hosting, no single point of failure. What makes it work is the community. People share their local libraries, and the network gets richer over time.

I recommend accessing it through Nicotine+, an open source client that's actively maintained and substantially better than the official Soulseek client. Once you're connected, search for the song you're looking for. More often than not, it'll be there, sometimes in better quality than you'd expect.

One important thing: point your own music folder at the Soulseek network. Share what you have. The network only works because people contribute back to it.

Step 4: This song basically doesn't exist

If Soulseek is empty, I genuinely respect your taste. You're probably looking for something so underground that only a few thousand people ever heard it before it disappeared. That's a hard situation to be in.

At this point there are two paths.

The first is brute-forcing Google. Search the song title, the artist name, random combinations, site-specific queries. Sometimes a random music blog, a private forum post, or an obscure file host turns up exactly what you're looking for. It's tedious and usually comes up empty, but occasionally it works.

The second path, which I recommend significantly more, is to use one of the more reliable sources of otherwise-unfindable music: Chinese streaming platforms that don't respect takedown requests from non-East Asian artists.

Chinese platforms

Two sites are worth knowing about: Netease Cloud Music and Kugou.

Both are major Chinese streaming platforms with enormous catalogs. Because Western artists and labels generally have little leverage over Chinese platforms, a lot of music that's been delisted everywhere else is still sitting on these sites completely untouched. I've found songs on these platforms that were the only remaining copy on the internet. 1/1, not available anywhere else.

Searching

Both platforms are searchable from the web to varying degrees. Sometimes the web interface works fine, sometimes it doesn't, depending on the track and geo-restrictions. If the web search isn't cooperating, you have two options.

Option 1: Scripts. Kugou in particular has a few community-built search and download scripts floating around. I also wrote my own, kugou-cli, which uses their API directly, handles search, and downloads in the highest quality available on the platform.

Option 2: The app. This is the more reliable route. Kugou requires a Chinese phone number to sign up, which makes it harder to access. Netease Cloud Music (also known as Music 163) does not. You can sign up with a US number, and a VOIP through Google Voice works fine. Once you're in, you get around 10–15 free 320kbps downloads per month through the app. Use them.

Downloading beyond the monthly limit

When you inevitably burn through your monthly downloads (and if you're the type of person reading this article, you will), netease-music-downloader is what I use. All you need is the song ID from the URL.

For example, the URL https://music.163.com/song?id=1814430384 has the ID 1814430384. Run the script with the auto-proxy flag, since accessing the download endpoint requires a Chinese IP and you almost certainly don't have one. Downloads typically come out at 256kbps.

Navigating Chinese interfaces

Both platforms are entirely in Chinese, which makes them awkward to use. You'll be guessing at menus, using browser translation, and occasionally just clicking things to see what happens. It's annoying but manageable.

Just be careful about what you're installing. The desktop clients for these platforms are real, legitimate apps, but navigating Chinese-language software with rough translations and unfamiliar UI patterns means paying closer attention than you normally would.

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Most people are never going to go this far. And honestly, that's fine. The earlier steps cover the vast majority of what anyone is looking for. But for the songs that genuinely don't exist anywhere else, these platforms are often the last option standing before something disappears completely.

I've had a lot more success than failure going through this whole chain. The cases where I still come up empty are genuinely rare. But they do happen. Some things are just gone.

If you've gotten this far and still can't find it, you have my sympathy. Seed what you do find on Soulseek. Someone else is probably looking for it too.