[jcranmer]

If you look at a graph of music industry revenue, it peaks in 2000, collapses until 2015 (at ½-⅓ its peak value), and has been on a strong uptick since then. Peak apoplexy about the impact of piracy was around 2005, and there was a strong desire to tie the collapse in revenue directly to piracy.

From what I can tell, most of the studies establishing a clear economic cost to piracy tend to rely on numbers originating from the music industry without clear attribution to data, or by naïve analyses estimating that 1 download = X lost sales, without considering effects like budgetary limits (I'll spend at most $X on entertainment this year) or conversions to profitable sales.

Additionally, there's a lot fewer studies on piracy post-revenue nadir. It seems as if the rise of streaming has caused the industry to stop panicking so much about piracy, and there's some evidence that streaming has converted consumers to paying customers.

All-in-all, I would say that it's not so much that piracy hurt the industry as piracy filled the existence of a market segment that the industry refused to fill. Piracy only hurt the industry in the same way digital cameras hurt Kodak: the existing business model was unsustainable, but they refused to pivot to take advantage of the clear coming shift in the business model.