Piracy and Business Models
tbray.org
tbray.org
The labels and everyone else who is against piracy act as if almost all of the pirated downloads would've been paid for if there was some way of stopping all piracy, when that is ridiculous. At most 10-20% from those pirates would buy the songs if piracy didn't exist. I think they even did a study in EU about a year or 2 ago on this, and that was the result, too.
Thinking that all the pirated songs would've been bought by people if piracy didn't exist, is like saying that if Lady Gaga's songs weren't on Youtube, she would've sold her songs a billion times, or whatever the amount of her total video views (maybe a bit less if you consider each person saw it on average a few times).