alt Hacker NewsSpotify is $12/month at most to get unlimited ad-free access to virtually all music.
To get access to "all" TV content legally would be hundreds of dollars a month. And for many movies you must buy/rent each individually. And legal TV and movies are much more encumbered by DRM and lock in, limiting the way you can view them. (like many streaming apps removing AirPlay support, or limiting you to 720p in some browsers)
I think Spotify wins over pirating because of its relatively low cost and convenience. Pirating TV/Movies have increased as the cost to access them has.
Replies
Barely all. I have so many songs in my playlist that has randomly become unavailable. It's quite frustrating to be honest.
It's absolutely not all, I'm an extremely casual listener, not 'into' music or anything, and I have plenty in a playlist that have disappeared (mostly I don't even know what they are, it's just greyed out with no information) for whatever reason. And that's just the stuff that was there at some point that I liked.
One of them has come back recently. It's still listed as by the wrong artist (same name, but dead, vs. the active artist who actually performed it) but I'm not reporting it again because I suspect I may have made it disappear for a couple of years in doing so before.
It's kind of crap and disorganised after anything more than barely glancing at it really, must be infuriating for (or just not used by) people who actually are into it.
Spotify used to be good, but have enshittified their UI past the point of usability for me. It really wants to play me tracks that are profitable for Spotify, not tracks I want to hear.
What you say is still true of the Amazon and Apple offerings, though. Haven't tried Youtube Music, so can't comment on that.
It's not even close to virtually all music. 256M songs doesn't come even close.
It's virtually all popular music recently published commercially in the world.
It's missing large portions of bootlegs, old music, foreign music, radio shows, mixtapes and live streaming music to list a few prominent categories from music in my private archive of cultural works. Those categories, btw, are well represented by torrents on tracker sites.