Australia

One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue. The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting anti-piracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.

— Gabe Newell, 2011

I reduced, but never really stopped, pirating visual media. Entirely because even when Netflix was the only streaming service, there were still tons of shows and movies that weren't accessible digitally at all.

However I completely stopped pirating music over a decade ago, because everything I wanted was available on Spotify, and the service of discovery is well worth the price. As long as they don't get greedy and the service cost only rises with inflation, they'll have my approx $100 annually (2023 baseline) for the rest of my life.

Netflix, Disney, Paramount, etc can eat a bag of dicks though. They've each proven they're nothing but greedy parasites, and the only way I'd stop pirating is with a single subscription that hosts everything for a reasonable price... There's a higher probability that hell freezes over, so instead I'll spend roughly $100 a month in computing hardware, internet services, and time, to pirate 90% of my content.

Steamers also paved the road to Cleveland

It's not just the reasonable price part. It's the ever increasing fragmentation of the video streaming market. When it was mainly Netflix, and it had a great variety of content, it was easy. Now every major studio has its own streaming service, and it's all about exclusivity. But you can only get real variety by subscribing to several streaming services.