This. Early 2000s pirating was harder and less convenient (no arr stack, no plex/jellyfin) but buying a bunch of dvd’s/cd’s was a lot more expensive, if they even were available, and personally I was pretty broke.

Then streaming came along. It was dope, for a good price you could get good enough quality and quantity, of both music and shows/movies. I stopped pirating.

When I was up to 3 or 4 video streaming services it hit me — I’m paying 40/50 a month, and I STILL don’t have everything I want to watch? This is bullshit.

Went back to pirating, now with all the new software sometimes I’ll download stuff that I have available elsewhere just because it’s all nicely integrated in my setup.

Still don’t pirate music, since music streaming is still convenient — 1 service, pretty much all the music.

I’ve had a similar experience, but for even longer (piracy of ZX Spectrum games was pretty common where I lived back in the 80s).

In my experience, the ebb and flow of piracy very much depends on the media - music was pretty easy to pirate from very early on the internet age as soon as decent sound compression methods were invented (most notably those used in MP3) because each track is a pretty small file then stuff like Spotify reduced it, video piracy actually took off with faster Internet and better compression methods (starting with MPEG) and then fell with cheap streaming, game piracy took increased with faster Internet (though there it was weirder - games sizes and internet speed kinda went up more or less in parallel) and then fell thanks to stores like Steam and GOG.

That said, I personally never switched from piracy to streaming because I saw it back then as “not really owning anything” with all the associated risks (which we’ve seen materializing with the enshittification of the last decade) plus I’m averse to subscription models since financially they tend to end up adding up to more money than just buying because you’re paying subscription to access a ton of mediocre stuff and a handfull of good stuff vs just buying the handful of good stuff.

(I suspect that, because I became familiar with and started working in Tech during the transition to the Internet Era, much earlier than most here, I was more keenly aware of the risks of what you supposedly “owned” not really being in your hands and the real overall financial returns for the user of subscription models, hence I always saw it as a trap).

The funny bit is that when I could just buy the digital media in an unlocked format, I switched away from piracy, which is why I pretty much didn’t pirate games during the DVD era, then games started coming with phone-home DRM and I went back to pirating again and later I discovered GOG and stopped pirating again.

Had I’ve been able to legally just buy and download videos in an open format, I would’ve gladly paid for it, but instead they’ve stopped getting money from me ever since locked-down region-locked Bluray became the norm.

Ditto. I used to nab stuff (movies, audio software) from Usenet. Then DVD rentals via mail came out and I paid for that. Then Netflix started streaming. Lots of content available for a single monthly fee. Nice. Much more convenient. Then the studios decided that what Netflix paid them in royalties wasn’t enough, we should start our own streaming service. That’s when the high seas became alluring to me once again