Almost everyone I know who pirates at this point does so for one of two reasons:

* Getting back content they've purchased that was removed by the vendor, or where their account with the vendor was closed without giving the customer a way to retrieve the things they've bought.

* content was not able to be purchased.

I haven't heard "beats paying" from anyone, almost everyone likes subscription music, Prime Video, Netflix and so on. Where the issues are is purchases, where people thought they bought something only to find out that they had a license that expires.

People may start out doing it because it’s free, but likely keep doing it for ideological reasons after they’ve seen so many paying customers get screwed over.

I’ll pay for digital music on iTunes, which is DRM free, but won’t buy movies there, as the DRM means it’s only good as long as Apple decides to keep it going. As we move from people maintaining media libraries to streaming, it seems like it’s only a matter of time before those digital copies become worthless.

At 50 I pirate because of convenience. Before it was because I could not stand the ads, today it is because I will not go through hoops to get something in country X just because I am in France.

I have ample money and subscribe to netflix, amazon prime and something else I forgot (I hardly watch tv).

I never pirate music anymore - Spotify is perfect. I have a family subscription.

I subscribe to Youtube because I like the content free from ads.

Netflix is getting worse and worse so someday I will stop the subscription and get the content via BitTorrent

I will pirate things I pay for, since there's simply no other way to actually own a copy. One prime example is the latest Star Trek show. The ads on Paramount are absolutely intolerable, despite paying for the service. So we continue to pay and watch ad-free pirated copies.

The exception for me is old stuff. I have exactly zero qualms about not paying for a forty year old movie. Half the actors are dead anyway. The film studio doesn't need or deserve my money for something nobody alive had anything to do with.

I do blanket pirate music, though. There doesn't seem to be a way for me to buy music without 99.999% of the money going to a label or a studio. Apart from bandcamp and other indie stores, but those typically aren't my jam in the first place. If I could support artists directly, I would. But I can't, and I refuse to support predatory labels, so I don't. I do feel a little bad about it, but options are limited.

Oh, and I will gleefully pirate textbooks, of course. Also research papers and most nonfiction in general. Audiobooks and fiction are a hard no unless unavailable or older than I am. Everyone should pirate textbooks always, it's only just.

So yeah, mostly for ideological reasons and the incomparable convenience.

I subscribe to prime video and another streaming service, that basically cover all my streaming needs. However, sometimes their DRM means I cannot screen share on discord or parsec or whatever and watch with my friend. So, I pirate it.

It's impossible to say, but studies have shown that the people who pirate the most also spend the most money on their preferred media, so an unwillingness to spend money doesn't seem to be the biggest reason.

Is this a tangential question? The OP suggests that there’s a utility to piracy beyond ideological reasons and just getting stuff for free. In other words, the categories you posed are not mutually exclusive.

I don’t know what percentage it is, but people in my age range (40-50) that I know who pirate tend to do so for fear of losing the media they love. I don’t even have time to watch 1% of what I have downloaded on my storage drives, but when I want to watch Mrs. Doubtfire in 25 years I want to make damn sure I can watch the original. I have little faith that whatever conglomerate owns that IP in a quarter century is going to make it easy for me to do so. Or make it even possible.

Personally I do it because I travel a lot. I also have Netflix, YouTube, Apple TV and Prime that I never bother looking at. Every new country I go to different movies and different shows are unavailable.

In one country show X is available on service Y - in another it’s available on service Z, in another it’s not available at all.

However, they are always available on Torrentleech and The Pirate Bay.

Deletion of previously licensed content will likely entice at least a few.

I pirate because it has become impossible to purchase stuff. So in fact the only way to experience it on my terms is to pirate.

The “theft” happens on both sides.

I stopped pirating music when Spotify came to the US. It’s proof that people will pay for things if A) the price is reasonable and B) consumption is convenient. Why? Pirating content is inconvenient. Popcorn Time was as close as it got to “convenient” but that was quickly shut down/abandoned.

Or just out of convenience?

What percentage globally? I have no idea. I'm not a pollster but I'd hate to try to design a poll that could figure that out. It seems like the sort of thing people will lie about.

When I was young, I pirated because I was broke.

When I got a job and grew older, I would continue to pirate, because it was annoying to shuffle through a DVD collection or for the game the disk to put into the drive bay for a game that was already installed on the computer's hard disk. I regularly downloaded no-cd cracks for games I had legally bought, and if I'm going to be fucking around with shady executables from disreputable corners of the internet anyway, I might as well save myself a car trip to the mall.

When Netflix streaming became ubiquitous and Steam became good, I stopped pirating, because it was more convenient to do media legally than it was to pirate them.

Now that Netflix has been Balkanized into a dozen competing services, all of which are shitty, I pirate TV/movies again, because it is more convenient to always know what site to go to to acquire media. I subscribe to Amazon prime for the free shipping, but even for media which is available on Amazon Prime, I still pirate it because -- wait for it -- the DRM doesn't work.

I still buy games on Steam because it's easy and convenient. If Ubisoft and EA get their way and cut into Steam's market share and make it so there are too few games available to play on Steam, or games that I've already paid for start becoming un-bought from my library, or Steam starts becoming unusable due to onerous DRM, I'll start pirating again.

Music is more complicated. In the '90s I ripped all my CDs into MP3s, and burned them onto data CDs which I put into a big ass CD changer in the trunk of my car. Later on, I could fit all of them on a DVD in the head unit. Later on, I could put them all on a USB thumb stick which I plugged into the console. As time went on, I realized I wasn't engaging with my music in any meaningful way. I'd turn it on and hit random and literally never think about what I was listening to. So I've picked up vinyl specifically because it's less convenient. I have to actually think about what music I want to listen to, and then actively make a decision.

So do I pirate movies and TV because I like free stuff? Not really. I probably spent in the ballpark of $50 on games a month, maybe $200 on music per month. I have the money to pay for video media. But the last thing I watched was the Legend of Vox Machina, which is produced by Amazon Studios specifically for Amazon Prime Video, which I already pay for, and I pirated it anyway because it's more convenient.

So do I pirate movies and TV for ideological reasons? Not really. I mean, don't get me wrong, Hollywood is kinda gross, but so is the video games industry and the music industry.

Sorry for rambling. I guess my point is that it's incorrect to set this up as a dichotomy between getting free shit and sticking it to the man. For me at least, it's neither of those things.