This is really not true. The vast majority of what is stolen is what is already popular, or how much something is stolen is in roughly based on how popular it is. That music doesn't need world of mouth or theft to make it popular, it's already popular which is why people are stealing it.

Everything else is vastly below that in terms of even potential sales, much less actual sales, and any theft of that material only hurts those artists, because they aren't getting a lot to begin with, and the internet has spread potential fans so thinly that they need every sale they can get.

And of course the massive theft of the popular stuff destroys the revenues that USED TO BE used to give new artists a shot. It was the windfall from the one in twenty or thirty or more who really hit big that provided the revenues to sign up the others who never hit it big.


As to the people who steal the most buying the most, I'm fairly sure that's nothing but an internet myth serving to justify theft. If in fact people who steal more buy more, then the music industry should be in a huge upswing, because the people who don't steal (because they either don't do music at all or they buy it) wouldn't have changed the equation one way or another. OTOH, the enormous number of folks stealing content like crazy would all be buying more, and hence the number of sales could only be going up.

But of course they've plummeted in the music industry, whose content is the easiest to steal. So it's a bit difficult to believe that theft generates sales.