Question about downloading in 2026

So I used to download a lot of music and movies back in the 2000’s and never had a problem with my ISP. I had always heard of people getting letters but that never happened to me.

Fast forward to a few years ago, I’m long been out of the game so I’m not as up on everything as I was back then. Back then I never used a VPN or anything. Mainly used torrents, IRC chat, and FTP’s for obtaining content for personal use. Long story short I got a letter from my ISP a few years back threatening to cut my service and possibly legal action, so I stopped.

Sorry if this post has already been asked but what do I need to do to be able to download without getting flagged by my ISP? I know a VPN is essential but I imagine it’s only certain VPN services because I had it through McAfee and it didn’t seem to work on torrents for some reason?

Hoping someone in the community here can provide some insight. It would be greatly appreciated as I’d love to update some of my music collection to higher quality files. Most my collection is 128kbps.