Greentext

Even ignoring P2P predecessors to torrenting like Kazaa or Napster, there was still piracy early on. I guess it counts as piracy adjacent, but I got started buying bootleg anime boxsets off ebay, because the actual boxsets were like $200/season, and minimum wage was under $7/hour when I started, but I could get the same season on three DVDs from Hong Kong for $30. It wasn't too long after that, I found out about fansubs and started spending far too much time on IRC, downloading anime, manga and music off XDCC bots. I wasn't allowed to use bittorrent on the family machine, because "That's like Kazaa, we'll get sued into ruin," but those bots in fansub group channels were fine, especially since it wasn't immediately apparent looking at mIRC that I had one running too.

Literally the only thing missing is full migration to H265 or AV1 with a solid bitrate.

It's still a bit inconsistent due to hardware acceleration capabilities and final file size targets.

Most torrents are too compressed or too huge.

Luckily bandwidth and storage is cheaper than ever, so going for full size quality rips is viable for many.

I mean, yeah. More or less.

Compare with the music industry, where there are a good number of streaming services, and pretty much all of them offer the same selection of music, all of it.

I don't think I know of anyone who pirates music at all.

The answer is greed. They make more being vertically integrated doing their own streaming than they would make taking a cut from a third party to host the same content.

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

Stream deez nuts. Glory to the pirates

I feel bad for the artists.