There have been numerous studies over 20 years that consistently show that pirates actually spend more money on media than the average person.

There are people in private trackers I have seen who literally advertise how all their rips are Blu-Rays they purchased. With how prolific some of those uploaders are, that’s literally thousands upon thousands of dollars worth of media they have bought.

I started caring about it as an issue when I found out that all the money Sony made from suing people for music piracy never made it to the artists. Artists had to sue Sony for any cut of that money. It is never about helping the artist.

Bandcamp is dying but they still have Bandcamp Fridays where the artists get 100% of the sale.

There are lots of barriers to this. Artists are firewalled to make sure everyone else gets a cut first. I general pirates tend to seek out direct support routes and undercut gatekeepers. Make it easy enough for people to access media directly and cheaply without ads with minimal middlemen and the majority will take this route. These opportunities are rarer and rarer though.