They’ve stopped rotating their curated playlists and made discovering playlists more and more annoying.
I’ve stopped paying for Spotify because of that and now primarily use Amazon Music Unlimited for music on the go but it also now started to have issues with too tracks becoming unavailable day in and day out.
I wish Pandora would become available outside of the US or Spotify Stations (I don’t know if it’s good, I’ve used Pandora back when they didn’t geoblock their services) because I want to be able to discover music.
Since the lockdown in the UK I’ve went back to using Internet Radio, my Yamaha Music Cast receiver has a good directory and it’s so far been a much better daily listening experience than Spotify.
I might give Napster and Deezer a try since they are supported by my main music setup at home too.
Their API (MusicKit) is decent, but the rate limiting is fairly onerous.
Amazon seems to work right now and I was pleasantly surprised that Spotify et al hasn’t killed internet radio yet.
The bit about "every single track" isn't true. It's hard to find torrents for older, more obscure things.
Your general take is right, though. It's easier to pay Spotify $10 per month than to go to the effort of torrenting, cataloging, transferring to your device, etc.
Maybe this falls in to the hard category but once you make it in to the private music tracker, you have everything trivially accessible. I still have an account on the tracker but I just don't bother using it since spotify is so cheap and useful. It just makes no sense that they would implement DRM since it does basically nothing since no one was prevented from piracy through DRM.