I think we are a little too quick to assume that a pirated copy is not a lost sale.
Audio software is a quite unusual field for all sorts of reasons, largely related to the huge divide between professional users and amateurs. The old school of pro-audio people can remember when a studio cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to equip and will pay pretty much any price you ask, even for quite trivial software. Your typical teenage dance-music producer is buying many of the same applications and will usually baulk at paying $99 for a cut-down version, let alone several hundred dollars for a full license.
It's interesting that really intrusive DRM techniques are broadly accepted - iLok is probably the most popular system, which requires you to buy a $50 USB dongle in addition to a very expensive piece of software. Again, experienced professionals who can remember tape see an iLok as a trivial inconvenience, but to a lot of younger people it's a total deal-breaker.
The music technology industry is part way through a weird economic transition. The traditional high-value professional market is dwindling away to nothing, but business has never been better because of the boom in amateur production. Firms like Native Instruments who have figured out how to sell to wannabe DJs and bedroom producers are shaking the money tree; A lot of very old and established names are struggling to keep the doors open.
Teenagers especially are really influenced by brands. I keep suggesting that 'industry standard' = 'same as all the others' and that being a bit different might be a good idea. No dice.
I admit I was thinking more of supercollider and puredata, so more 'sonic arts' I suppose.
The biggest hurdle from my point of view is that low-latency audio on operating systems that are not Windows or OS X is a joke. Some organization needs to sink and huge chunk of developer time into either improving the user and developer experience of JACK or writing something new. Maybe once that is in place and starts shipping in vanilla Ubuntu (no special kernel requirement either!) the user software developers will be able to start catching up with the tools available on the Win/Mac platforms.
They are all too stuck in the sliders/knobs metaphor. I'm not sure it's an adequate metaphor for people who has not produced in the physical world before.