In my country a lot of people in IT are contractors (not employees) and sometimes these contracts are wild (like not working on anything else during that time and stuff like that).
Maybe it just depends where you live or how you use internet/social media? For me it's actually much easier. As an introvert I don't really like approaching random people "on the street". So whenever I start a new hobby or interest I usually just find some local community via their website/forum/Facebook, participate online and then join them in person. This has worked amazingly for me over the last 25+ years.
It probably depends on music genre, but Bandcamp hosts a ton of music that's not available anywhere else. Spotify is great for popular music, but a lot of small/niche artists have presence only on Bandcamp, both digital and physical. Pretty much all of my vaporwave/futurefunk/synthwave vinyl records are from Bandcamp.