This is generally how the media industry works. Paying for content (online at least) is almost always more complex, less flexible and lower quality.

Add to that the various geographical restrictions (have the audacity to live outside of the US? No content for you!) and piracy becomes quite attractive.

Not with music though.

Unless you want to non-English artists. Korean music for example used to be a nightmare on all streaming platforms when I last tried them.

When people say everything is on Spotify, they really mean that everything they know which is Spotify, is on Spotify.

Half the stuff I recommend to people is not on Spotify or Youtube. Thank goodness I had the "entitlement" to build a giant mp3 collection because I have no idea where I'd find it otherwise.

I decided to do that as well, and the fact that artists get literal pennies from Spotify made me completely apathetic towards piracy. I support artists I like through merch and concerts, which is where they make money nowadays.

This started with DVDs that had unskippable anti piracy messages that piracy tools would either bypass or automatically enable skippability.

And shoplifting is also easier than waiting in line at checkout.

That's true as a quip, but what's also true is that piracy flourishes if and only if there are no comfortable means of obtaining content legally. Music piracy was a big thing until it basically dropped dead from one day to the other when music streaming services like Spotify packed all music into one easy subscription. I would also say that movie piracy also dropped significantly when Netflix subscriptions became mainstream (not necessarily in terms of number of available movies, but certainly in terms of market share).

"all music", not by a stretch

more like redefining what people think is "all music"

Also sharing mp3s was sharing our full fucking musical culture with each other. We had WHAT.CD. You could make mixtapes. Copyright vultures destroyed ALL of this and put shit like Spotify in the middle of it, making it the arbiter of what is and is not part of this shared culture. Controlling HOW it is shared, what you can do with it and preventing it from being shared with people not in the paying Spotify club.

The things they did to our shared culture, in the name of "stopping privacy" has cost us SO fucking much.