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.

Streaming isn't stable. Songs get pulled, catalogs get reshuffled, whole artists go missing overnight because of a label dispute happening in a room you're not in. If you've ever opened a playlist and found a greyed-out line where a song used to be, you know the feeling. This is the process I run when that happens.

Step 1: it's still on streaming

The easy case. If a song is on Spotify or Apple Music, it's almost certainly on the others. They all pull from the same handful of distributors.

If you have a paid account somewhere, OnTheSpot is what I use. Desktop app, talks to the streaming service's API directly, downloads tracks, albums, and playlists cleanly.

If you don't, Lucida used to be the universal answer for pulling from basically every platform. It still works for SoundCloud. Everything else has gotten more restrictive over the past couple of years.

What I'd actually start with regardless is Monochrome. It's a Tidal interface that doesn't require a subscription, and it'll download in any quality from 128kbps up to Dolby Atmos. Tidal's catalog is wide enough that if a song is on any major streaming platform, it's almost certainly on Tidal too. Just start here.

Step 2: it's been delisted

Songs get pulled all the time. Catalog disputes, rebrands, licensing fights, artists deciding they don't want a particular era of their work to be available anymore. None of it means the audio is gone. It just means the official channels stopped serving it.

YouTube, SoundCloud, and Bandcamp are the next places to look. Fan reuploads, archive accounts that mirror discographies, official uploads from the artist's own channel that predate the delisting and just stay up. Something's almost always there.

For SoundCloud, Lucida is fine. For YouTube, yt-dlp is the only tool you need. Bandcamp has direct download options on the page if the artist enabled them.

Step 3: Soulseek

Soulseek is a peer-to-peer file-sharing network that's been running since 2000, built specifically around music. Over twenty-five years it's become one of the best archives of rare and underground music on the internet. The people on it aren't general-purpose torrenters. They're collectors and archivists who ripped their CD libraries a decade ago and left the share running. The quality is consistently better than you'd expect.

You connect to a central server, search, and the file transfers directly between you and whoever has it. No centralized hosting. When you set your client up, point it at your music folder and share what you have.

The client to use is Nicotine+. Open source, actively maintained, better than the official Soulseek client. You search, you download. Most of the time the song's there, sometimes in better quality than the streaming version was.

Step 4: this song basically doesn't exist

If Soulseek's empty, I genuinely respect your taste. You're chasing something maybe a few thousand people heard before it disappeared.

Two paths.

Brute-force Google. Song title, artist name, weird combinations, site-specific queries, deep into page-three results. Sometimes a music blog from 2014 or a forum post from a fan archive turns up exactly what you need. Most of the time it's a dead end.

Chinese streaming platforms. Specifically Netease Cloud Music and Kugou. This is where I find most of the songs I can't find anywhere else.

Why Chinese platforms

Both are massive Chinese streaming services with catalogs comparable to anything in the West. The relevant thing for our purposes is that Western artists and labels have very little leverage over them. When a song gets pulled from Spotify and Apple Music and YouTube because of a label dispute or a regional rights issue, it tends to stay sitting on Netease and Kugou, untouched.

I've found songs on these platforms multiple times that I couldn't find anywhere else. Not Soulseek, not YouTube, not on some random forum thread. The only remaining copy on the indexable internet was on a Chinese streaming app.

Searching

Both have web interfaces. Both work some of the time. Whether a search returns results depends on the track and on whatever geo-restriction is applying that day.

When the web search isn't cooperating, two options.

Scripts. Kugou in particular has a few community-built search and download scripts floating around. I wrote my own, kugou-cli, which uses the Kugou API directly, handles search, and downloads whatever quality Kugou is exposing for the track. No monthly limits going through the API. The catch is that the quality is inconsistent. You'll get anywhere from 128kbps up to actual lossless. Everything comes down as a FLAC file regardless of what's inside it, so a 128kbps track wrapped in a FLAC container is still a 128kbps track.

The official app. More reliable, more annoying to set up. Kugou wants a Chinese phone number to register. Most people reading this won't have one. Netease Cloud Music (also called Music 163) doesn't. You can sign up with a US number, and a Google Voice VOIP number works fine. Once you're in, the app gives you 10 to 15 free 320kbps downloads a month. Use them.

Past the monthly limit

You'll burn through those free downloads. After that, netease-music-downloader is what I use. All it needs is the song ID, which is the number at the end of the URL. So https://music.163.com/song?id=1814430384 has ID 1814430384. Run with the auto-proxy flag on, since the download endpoint is gated to Chinese IPs and you almost certainly aren't on one. Files come out at 256kbps.

Navigating the interfaces

Both platforms are entirely in Chinese. Browser translation gets you most of the way there, but a lot of menus are graphical, a lot of buttons translate strangely, and you'll spend some time clicking things to see what they do. It's awkward but it's not actually difficult.

What you do need to pay attention to is what you install. The desktop clients are real, legitimate Chinese software. Not malware. But operating Chinese-language software with rough machine translation and unfamiliar UI means paying more attention than you'd normally have to.

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Most people will never go past step three, and there's no reason to. Steps one through three cover almost everything anyone is realistically looking for.

I run this chain a lot. The cases where I still come up empty after everything are rare, and the songs in those cases are usually genuinely lost. Someone made a thing once, uploaded it once, and the upload eventually came down. If that's the situation you're in, I'm sorry.

Whatever you do find, seed it on Soulseek. Somebody else is going to be looking for it next.