Here he's using Sylenth1 licensed to "Team A.I.R." ...a well-known VST piracy org: https://audiosex.pro/threads/team-air.41932/
Just goes to show, you might build the tool that makes the next club banger or viral social platform, but good luck making anyone, pros or hobbyists, pay for it.
Between 2005 - 2010, many studios also had "a lot of water" in their computers, so to speak. (Referring to Team H2O)
Incidents like these are unfortunately common among famous electronic music producers. Your comment reminded me of Steve Aoki being caught with a pirated copy of Sylenth1.[1] I recall hearing that he obtained a legitimate license for the software afterwards.
Lastly, I recall the Sylenth1 developer around 2012 - 2015 encouraging people on Twitter to purchase the software rather than pirate it. Not sure how they found tweets mentioning piracy of the plugin, but I do think the plugin is reasonably priced compared to other plugins. Moreover, the license is perpetual.
[1] https://torrentfreak.com/avicii-and-other-djs-produce-hits-u...
The market for that is tiny compared to music but, the money made basically guaranteed given adoption rates. Even today I think there are too few contenders to pose a significant market risk to these companies.
From a consumer perspective hardware dongles are mega-problematic right now because of the USB C vs USB A debacle on new laptops, and also because many AVs now block USB devices by default and require ITS admin to unblock it.
From a distributor perspective, they require shipping physical product to customers which reduces margins and can take weeks, especially-so when you talk about shipping from overseas.
Some seem to work a little like what you say, UVIs for example decrypt libraries against the ilok, and R2R has UVIEMU for that, but clearly it's not sufficient to crack all ilok plugins that way, or Softube's wouldn't remain uncracked.
And since ilok doesn't require a dongle anymore - there are machine and cloud licensing options too, and developers can opt in or out to each of the 3 license holder systems...
I have a bit of sympathy though, since managing plugin licensing is a total pain. Licenses seem to break randomly, or after any OS security patch or DAW update/bug fix, and then your project no longer runs properly. Kind of the last thing you want if you are a practicing or performing musician.
If I were him I'd consider using the pirate versions for reliability/usability but paying for new licenses yearly in order to support the plugin developers.
It's anecdotal but people around me are less inclined to install pirated stuff than 20+ years ago. The risk to install some malware and the consequences are higher than they were back then.