Maybe the society has to finally adapt & embrace to the way things are going in the last 20 years: music stars to earn their money in the concerts they sold out due to "piracy" and not from selling CDs, movie stars from royalties paid by subscribers of Netflix and HBO and other such services, or even monetize their popularity directly from endorsing products.

Software developers seem to be the first to adapt: you can't pirate a SaaS or a cloud. One can try and copy it, but will be always behind the first moved and the original creator, because they always seem to have good ideas.

Equating IP with real estate is bad for the society: why would someone keep producing and keep performing if they made a hit with a song, or a movie, or a game?

Do people really pirate music much anymore? It feels that Spotify and similar services won over piracy except in a few edge cases.

I tend to just listen to music on YouTube these days. For the most part, what I want to listen to is available on there, albeit probably not with the consent of the copyright holder.

Does that count as piracy?

Youtube-dl can turn the YouTube videos into audio tracks for you, at least a few steps closer to piracy.

Don't forget the lovely mps-youtube, which allows you to search YouTube, play audio and build playlists right from your terminal.

It's been a godsend for me in locations with extremely slow or intermittent connections.

https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube