Discussing an artist whose music you've heard is in no way guaranteed to compensate that artist. At best, someone, somewhere, will hear the word of mouth and spend some money that goes back in the direction of the artist. There is no guarantee though - you end up hand-waving in a benefit when it cannot be proven that your piracy helped anything, though it can be proven that you didn't pay for what they are asking you to pay for as, currently, the means of profit is mostly tied to the distribution channels, not the production. Saying 'they should have done things differently' and then pirating their music is a lot like blaming the victim.

Now, hearing their music and then going out and buying a CD / paying for a legal download / picking up some show tickets or t-shirts is a different story, and is the best possible outcome of piracy. I'm not arguing against these people - these people are cool people, and are trying to affect a change in the system. If more people did this, show and swag revenue would increase and reduce the dependency on the digital content distribution as a source of income, which might have a very meaningful impact on new artists when they see the example.

I'm not really going to address the 'social pariah' argument, because I've never been one nor do I know what it is like to be have friends that would 'shun' for the crime of not pirating music (not committing a crime?). I will say that using the 'everyone is doing it argument' is not particularly constructive.

Games, IMHO, are a completely different animal in many respects, and since the only way to actually compensate the developer (currently) is to pay for the game, then I am actually about as hard-lined on this as it is possible to be - you shouldn't be playing the game if you haven't paid for it. Steam is a great example of offering services in exchange for content restrictions, and is (IMHO) the reason PC gaming is still alive as anything other than an indie-playground.

My personal opinion is that PC games (in particular) are actually headed in the direction of always-on MMO-like behavior that requires an internet connection in order to be part of the game world, and this is by design. I'm not necessarily talking Ubisoft's reprehensible always-on-even-during-singleplayer DRM, i'm talking about games that will act like MMOs in order to ensure the playerbase needs to be online in order to get most of the game. Sure, you can play a gimped pirated version, but why would you? All the good stuff is on their servers, which require authentication.

I will point out that despite the ease with which one could pirate a game like Skyrim, it still sold 2.8 million units in November alone. Mostly, I'm sure, because people want to pay for the game, not because of anti-piracy measures... other than Steam, which I suppose counts as that.

So I guess what I am saying is that despite the fact that I will argue for the moral necessity of funding development of digital content by paying for it until such a time as the means of distribution is no longer the primary income source, I am unconvinced that piracy is such a huge problem that it requires anything more than prosecution of the most blatant violators and those that profit from it.