I'm not really worried about whether a label or corporation deems me to have the "right" to listen to their music. The only thing I'm concerned with outside of consuming the art is the artist who made it. I highly doubt any artist would genuinely care if someone pirated their music but still payed them through other means (like buying merch, tickets, etc).
I think the argument of who gets paid what when you buy merch is irrelevant when you consider the alternative being the artist gets virtually nothing. I would have to listen to an artist 200 times for them to maybe get a singular dollar from spotify. If whoever is handling their merch store is giving them less than that for each sale of a shirt then it's the artists fault at that point for still working with them.
Personally I do this by buying merch. If I buy a shirt from a band than not only do I get a cool shirt but the band also gets paid more in that single transaction than if I listened to their music 5000 times on spotify.
I've found the best way to check for leaks with torrenting is by using ipleak.net. They have a feature which will tell you the address it sees you torrenting from. Super handy.
I like how he made an edit to say no one is arguing his point and the only response he got is arguing his point and then he replies to that with no argument.
I've heard of Dark Castle as Stevie Floyd is the now ex-wife of Jef Whitehead who's my favorite musician period. I haven't actually listened to any of their stuff though, maybe I should give them a try?
Hoopla seems okay for people who listen to a lot of mainstream stuff. I've never actually heard about it before now or used it so everything I say is just coming straight out my ass, but, it seems their library is very limited. Orpheus has a very extensive library with almost everything on there having a lossless flac version. It's still nothing compared to Soulseek, but as long as you're into bands/artists with more than 5 listeners in their lifetime, you'll be able to find everything. It all just comes down to what you're looking for though.
For a lot of people, it's a community thing. I'm a member on Orpheus and they have a lot of great community stuff like Album of the Month, user made scripts, tutorials, forums, etc. They can also have a lot higher quality content and moderation because they're so "exclusive". And, for music, a private tracker is gonna be 100x better than a public one or Soulseek.
It's also not tall enough. The blade would probably just get lodged into the victims throat while they slowly bleed out.