This! A lot of young people pirate media to save money. But then when they grow up and start working, they /still/ keep pirating because now they are used to getting their hands on quality media that they like, rather than consuming whatever "curated content" the algorithm deems fit to make available. Usually these people are also subscribed to regular services, but still find it a far better experience to pirate stuff.

EDIT: Fixed typo "grow up".

Or stupid region restrictions.

Example: I signed up for crunchyroll after I learned a show I wanted to watch was there.

Then after I paid, found out that on my country, it is not available.

Or when I bought a ton of books in fictionwise, then Barnes e noble bought them and restricted downloads only to people from USA. Funnily I only bought from that site because was the only site that sold to my country.

Wow you have a completely different experience from me. 100% of the pirates I know are pirating entertainment products that they usually wouldn’t otherwise buy. Not, like, getting back at some company who wronged them. Interesting lesson on different cultural groups I guess!

>I haven't heard "beats paying" from anyone,

Ive head

- beats paying, or too expensive - because I can lol - because fuck [insert company here] - because Plex is more convenient - because I want to apply an english subtitle/patch to it - because mods

none of my friends were banned from PSN/Netflix/Amazon/etc. It's just cheaper or more convinient for them.

granted, these were mostly for games, and there has yet to be a "Netflix for games" as of now.