I mean…why? you said yourself there’s paid stuff that you’re not going to use so just use soulseek if you’re going to be downloading anyways.
I dont’ use any music streaming service because the artists get paid peanuts and won’t see my dime when I use them. so i’ll support them more directly. Take your money, buy your favourite artists shirt or other merch.
it depends.
I’m old enough to remember when PC demos were a thing and essentially if a demo didn’t exist, the game likely wouldn’t sell well. Hell there used to be entire websites that ONLY had demos for download of upcoming releases. So now game companies don’t do demos anymore, I pirate the games as a demo. If it’s something I think I’ll play through and come back to in a month or two or even a year then I’ll buy it. If it’s an indie dev I’ll buy it because I want to support them.
If it’s something I’m no likely to finish or will finish and never pick it up again, high seas.
Music is different. I just soulseek everything. I’m not paying some crappy streaming service to then provide pennies to the artist. I can support artists I like via other means. Merch sales, going to concerts, etc that’s where they get their money.
TV and movies? fuck em. I’m not paying for that crap when 9 times out of 10 something that I like is just going to get cancelled after 2 seasons. They don’t need my money.
Books? nope, always pay for those.
I do freelance/consultation dev work and I’d say most of my clients are having this problem right now. But this is a problem of their own doing. Most got rid of their dev teams and instead leveraged AI and less than a handful of junior devs to essentially just be prompt monkeys. I eventually get called into these places to code review the slop that got churned out and the majority of the time the solution is to start from scratch without heavily utilizing LLM’s that got them into this situation in the first place. The problem is though they now need to hire competent senior level devs again. But they can’t.
They place ads on linkedin, indeed, etc and then get absolutely hammered with resumes written by AI. The vast majority of which are resumes from people that are either incredibly unqualified or are from like India. They again had to stop using AI to read them because naturally it’s just pulling the bullshit from the pile of bullshit it’s being fed. The ACTUAL devs that are applying get lost in the shuffle. Now they have to manually comb through all the resumes and verify that they’re not AI crap before even attempting to read it.
So it wouldn’t surprise me if places are just giving up and no one is getting hired. I can speak for myself and other consultants I personally know that we’re having to turn down work because we’re booked solid and don’t have the time. I’ve run out of people to refer jobs to cause we’re all in the same boat.
The industry axed a metric shit ton of people and now needs them back and they simply can’t find them.