Let me paraphrase it - if there's a dozen of streaming services, and one of them does misbehaves, it gives you a reason to pirate? That's a really poor excuse (or if that's a joke, then it's a poor one too).
It highlights a very serious issue, though - an increasing number of services use all kinds of crazy DRM that only result in great inconveniences for the paying user.
Compare that to the relative simplicity of having your music, books, etc. as a plain file, and you can see where the problem is: paying gets you less, rarely more.
I think you are generalizing "paying" to "subscribing to a streaming service" here, which I don't think is entirely fair.
You can still pay for your music the old-fashioned way, by buying songs on Amazon MP3, iTunes, etc., which will yield you DRM-free, plain MP3 / AAC files that you can use where and how you want to (unless, apparently, you entrust them to iTunes and enable iTunes Music...).
And while the book industry unfortunately hasn't quite followed the same path, there are still many great sources for books around that also provide you with DRM-free, high quality files (e.g. OReilly, Packt, lots of smaller publishers).
> You can still pay for your music the old-fashioned way, by buying songs on Amazon MP3, iTunes, etc., which will yield you DRM-free, plain MP3 / AAC files that you can use where and how you want to (unless, apparently, you entrust them to iTunes and enable iTunes Music...).
This is true now, but it wasn't always; it's a hard-fought right that should be appreciated rather than taken for granted. (Not to say that you are so taking it, but a superficial reading of your post might sound that way.)
Like? I feel that we've reached the stage where it's pretty easy to pay for digital music/streaming at this point. As far as saying that it's almost entirely easier than pirating music.
When you stream music/buy from iTunes you have to deal with drm, latency, shitty software that can't easily be customized, stream drops, data charges, needing to be on the internet.
When you pirate music it's the same as searching spotify, except you click download instead of play and you get files that work forever on any device. Storage smaller than your fingernail fits a straight month worth of music for $20 and works just as well if you're in the mountains as when you're on the train to work.
> 1. Spotify - doesn't allow you to buy premium (which is availble worldwide) if you have a non-US credit card.
if you live in a country where spotify is officially available[1], you can buy premium with your local card (i pay about ~7 usd/23 brl for a two people family plan).
It's not just one misbehaving streaming service, is that there is an incentive for streaming servicrs to do that (lock-in) and little danger they would face when doing this.
I am from Brazil, we have stores and street vendors that sell pirated stuff, frequently more expensive than the original... people buy it due to better service and ease of payment. (example: pirated freeware, that was fan translated, while the original is only in a language noone knows here.)
If I'm given the choice between a free proprietary, inflexible system like Apple Music, and paid DRM-free content that I own and can keep as long as I want (basically, paid pirated content), I'll choose the latter.
But let's be real, it's far easier to grab flacs from the usual places than futz around with ripping your own vinyl.