AI Summary
5 min readPiracy is back. In the 2010s, BitTorrent accounted for a third of all internet traffic, Limewire had more monthly users than Facebook, and the Pirate Bay was the only video store where you were sure to find what you were looking for. At its peak, 95% of all music downloads were pirated. Then, around 2012, it stopped. Peer-to-peer file sharing collapsed. The obvious explanation: streaming services like Netflix and Spotify were simply a better, easier, and safer way to access content. But now, as those services have become markedly worse and simultaneously more expensive, piracy is making a comeback. The conversation on Asmongold TV explores why this is happening, and why the full story is more complicated than simple corporate greed.
The Service Problem and the Return of Friction
The core argument, drawn from an old Gabe Newell quote, is that "piracy is a service problem." The reason piracy collapsed in the first place is that services like Netflix and Spotify acted as market replacements. They were cheap, convenient, and risk-free. Spotify is the prime example: it killed music piracy because it offered a one-stop shop with nearly every song, a clean interface, and no viruses. As Asmongold puts it, "Netflix is a better service than using Pirate Bay. It is. It's a better service. You get a higher quality product on average. There's no watermarks."
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:53) **Piracy is a Service Problem** - Asmongold introduces the core thesis: piracy declined because services like Netflix and Spotify made legal access easier than piracy, but now that those services have become worse and more expensive, piracy is making a comeback.
- 2 (01:48) **The Golden Age of Piracy and Its Collapse** - The video essay explains how piracy dominated the early 2010s, then suddenly collapsed after 2015, not just because of streaming, but because of a more complex set of factors.
- 3 (04:08) **The Adversarial Relationship with Streaming** - The discussion highlights how the proliferation of expensive, ad-riddled streaming services has created an adversarial relationship with customers, pushing them back toward piracy.
- 4 (06:18) **Pirates Are the Target Audience** - A key finding from an Australian survey is presented: people who pirated content were actually more likely to pay for it if it was available, because they are simply the most engaged consumers.
- 5 (07:11) **The Whack-a-Mole Problem and Streaming's Superiority** - The video explains that despite crackdowns, piracy was resilient (the Pirate Bay was its own most-downloaded file), but streaming services like Netflix were simply a better user experience.
- 6 (10:13) **The Return of the "High Seas"** - The video describes the current state of streaming: dozens of expensive services, content split across platforms (even seasons of the same show), and the introduction of ads, making piracy the easier option again.
- 7 (11:22) **It's Not Just Greed: The Movie Industry is Broken** - The video pivots from the simple "greedy companies" narrative to argue that the movie industry's fundamental economics are broken, and the golden age of streaming was never meant to last.
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Show Notes
Piracy is back Asmongold show for all of his stream highlights, competitions, reactions & more.
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