What.CD - not because of the free music but because of the community, recommendations by friends and discovering new music on a daily basis.
Right now I’m just listening to the “For You” section of Apple Music and very rarely discover something new. I also don’t really have a way to keep things that I like around as there’s no nice way to put things in your library if you don’t use iCloud Music library. Streaming services also miss a lot of editions or different recordings and their meta tags are usually very bad.
A very large portion of the WCD community, especially the more active members of the forums, have largely moved to [Redacted] or [God of Music]. In case you never found out and would like to possibly re-unite with some old friends from WCD.
I’m on all of these and it’s not the same and I think it will never be. Mostly because torrenting in general is getting less popular and with the raise of streaming services and them getting “good enough” a lot of heavy users including myself moved on. It was also apparent in the forum activity on What that went down steadily over the last years. I also experienced that a lot of my social circle wasn’t that active any more at the end as they got older / out of university and started to work. I used to be on the site for hours every day interviewing people but once you start working you just want to do something that doesn’t involve a screen in the evening, at least in my experience.
I agree it's not the same - but wanted to put that offer on the table in case you weren't and wanted to contact people you may have lost touch with because of the shutdown. Losing touch with friends because you cannot contact them is terrible.
Right now I’m just listening to the “For You” section of Apple Music and very rarely discover something new. I also don’t really have a way to keep things that I like around as there’s no nice way to put things in your library if you don’t use iCloud Music library. Streaming services also miss a lot of editions or different recordings and their meta tags are usually very bad.