It's not the 10$ a month for Spotify: 10$ to Spotify, 10 to Netflix, another 10 to Disney+, to Now TV/SKY (in my country), to DAZN, to Prime Video, etc. If you sum all the services you have to pay you spend easily more than 100$ a month in streaming services, that is 1200$ a year that is for most person in my country a month of work! And the others would rather spend if for other things, such as a vacation.
Finally pirating is most of the time more convenient, for example using these proprietary services on Linux or Raspberry Pi etc is not possibile, also they require internet and you can't just for example save the files on an USB stick or CD to play on the car stereo.
> using these proprietary services on Linux or Raspberry Pi etc is not possibile
I can't speak to Raspberry Pi (and other non-x86 boards), but on my PC I can listen to Spotify just fine. I don't even have to use Chrome. It works as well on Firefox.
On a PC, yes. But let's say that I want to listen to music in my car, and I have an old stereo (that I don't want to replace) that only has CD and/or USB input. I can't from Spotify just take the music and download it to an USB stick or burn a CD, even with premium (I can download it to play offline, but they are DRM protected and I can play only from the official player)
I get it, but if my car doesn't have it, and I don't want to buy a new stereo. Also, Bluetooth requires wasting my phone battery, and use either mobile data bandwidth or phone memory space, while I can load a 64Gb USB sticks of songs or burn a bunch of CDs and forget about it.
Finally pirating is most of the time more convenient, for example using these proprietary services on Linux or Raspberry Pi etc is not possibile, also they require internet and you can't just for example save the files on an USB stick or CD to play on the car stereo.