Nah, I won't pay for music, unless it's a signed record, because the bands get pretty much no money from the sale, so it's more of a fuck you to the labels. But I will travel to go to concerts and buy merch to support them.
I guess I should get around to figuring out how to use usenet, though.
This was more true when the labels were running everything. Now you can get a lot of the material more-or-less directly from the artists on various platforms. Instead of artists getting 5% of the $$$, they can get 70%+.
Just saying that not everything you listen to is necessarily by a band signed to a label. A lot of newer talents have gotten wise to the scam the labels have been running (for the same reasons you articulated - who would knowingly sign up for that?) and are putting things out themselves instead.
Ah, that makes sense, but I only listen to the same artists I have been for 20 years (or artists that I've discovered that have been active for that long), so not much has changed with the labels for me specifically.
Usenet is way better than torrenting. I had heard about it for years and finally checked it out a month ago. I bought a few lifetime memberships to trackers (but just nzbgeek might be enough) and subscribed to news hosting. The reliability and speeds are so much better. Plus the traffic is encrypted and it's much less common than torrenting so also safer