Thanks for the tips Jay! although I gave up on Netease/QQ/Kuwo after unsuccessful attempts on my iPhone and Mac. I've been happily using kdramaost since.
Jay:
If you're still looking, here's some suggestions:
If you're really into chinese music, you can download NetEase (网易云音乐) or QQ音乐 on your phone, it should have most drama ost you're looking for. If you have iPhone you need to temporarily switch your country and update your payment method (you can set to none) and use a random/made-up address. Once you have the app, you can switch back to US.
If you search the drama name in chinese, you will get more results on Google as well, some chinese sites offer downloadable content. You'll want to add some keywords to get the OST: ost, bgm, 歌曲, 歌, 曲, 主题曲, 乐, 配乐, depending on what you're looking for.
If you already know the name of the song, make sure to type it in chinese and add "mp3" and you might find a free mp3 on google. Some might require you to register, you can try your best to register.
Personally, I find youtube quite reliable and go there first before searching elsewhere but if you don't like downloading from youtube, try these.
Sunset:
I don't like downloading from YT either, seems like an outdated thing to do since I used to do that in the 2000s era lmao some decent sites I used to listen to/download mp3s have disappeared by now :/
https://kdramaost.com/en/albums has some c-drama OSTs for free download even though I use that mostly for k-dramas.
Thanks Sunset! yes I've been using kdramaost. They are up-to date with almost all of the current C-drama OSTs.
