This is one of the best responses I've seen to this debate here or otherwise. As someone involved in that value chain, but who is not a musician or record label, I can say with confidence that illegal downloading has devastated the lives of many people I know- engineers, session musicians, composers, persons who work at labels, publishers, distributors, etc. And the worst part of it is that the small indie type artist and labels, that people claim to support instead of the majors, are the ones who suffer the most. WEA, EMI, etc. can scale down and adapt, but look at Pinnacle in the UK, who went under yesterday, taking a huge amount of indie labels with them effectively.