> So the question is this, if there was two versions of a popular torrent site, equal in every way, except you had to pay for one to get the same content. What percentage of users would choose to use the pay site? I suspect a small fraction of a percent.

That's not the question at all, no. I said you need better service than pirates. And that's absolutely possible, as steam shows.

Meanwhile spotify is busy losing my offline songs for no reason when i'm abroad and can't really stream because of roaming and netflix refuses to give me the original english audio.

I never had a problem with downloaded songs just disappearing when i bought an album from bandcamp or a youtube video refusing to play in english.

Using netflix and spotify is way easier than some kind of setup with Kodi or whatever people use, but they need to stop crippling their services. Some people pirate stuff instead, I mostly just stop consuming content where i'm treated like shit even after paying.

Unfortunately, it's not Netflix so much crippling, as it is all the content creators trying to get a bigger piece of the pie. It was inevitable, there will never been a single place to get all of your media. Even Steam has lost high profile games to Origin, Uplay, and whatever other half dozen or so nonsense services there are out there. I'm sure as shit not going to torrent pirated copies, so I reluctantly install them all if I want to play the game.