TL;DR at the bottom.
I started getting into torrents about 2 years ago, at the time I started out with downloading YIFY rips and x265 RARBG encodes. I didn't care about the quality at the time, I was just happy to get movies. But I also wanted stuff like Special Features, and while Tigole and the QxR team occasionally added them for some of their movies, it felt like something was missing.
Eventually I grew dissatisfied with encodes, and wanted to watch movies in the highest quality possible. I would have downloaded BDMVs, but no one seemed to be seeding them, or in the case of less-mainstream/obscure movies, they weren't on public trackers at all. (I tried downloading REMUXes from FGT, but they always replaced the PGS subtitles with UTF text subtitles, which I didn't appreciate.) So in early 2022 I bought myself a Blu-ray optical drive, set up MakeMKV, and bought the Blu-ray of the movie I wanted to rip. After that, I bought some more BDs to rip, and I started making my own REMUXes. Some time after that, I flashed my drive with the LibreDrive firmware so I could rip my 4K UHD discs too.
So anyway, my point is that the arguments that piracy is "bad for business" and causes companies to "lose money" are full of hot air. If anything, piracy is good for them and increases sales. There have been numerous occasions where I have wanted to download a REMUX and there were no seeders, and decided it would be easier for me to buy the disc and rip it myself.
So, the main takeaways are:
- Piracy isn't nearly as bad as the authorities say it is, and may actually increase sales.
- Create good-quality encodes.
- Seed all your torrents.
TL;DR: Started buying and ripping my own Blu-rays due to dissatisfaction with low-quality encodes and lack of seeders.
I was a huge Metallica fan. Saw them for both Ride the Lightning and Justice when they toured. Most of us got into them by pirating (ie, copying album->tape or tape->tape for/from friends). I spent more on their tickets and concert tees than I would have buying their albums. But after Lars and that Napster shit, I just figured they were dead to me. Haven't listened to them since.
Oh man, you brought up a really good point. There's the albums, and then there's the merch. Metallica junkies would have like 20 band shirts and so much Metallica swag all over their places. Those guys would drop thousands of dollars. They lived for that music. When Lars came out and was basically "it's about the money" so many fans stopped caring about the music. When they stopped caring about the music they stopped buying the merch.