I do recall reading about some trend major publishers did, with seeding 'bad' versions of songs with the same titles as the 'real' ones, confusing people in to wasting bandwidth and resharing 'bad' files. Was that terribly effective?
I remember Madonna's "What the fuck do you think you're doing" mp3's. But it really didn't make me change my habits, or even really annoy me.
Actually, I still haven't changed my habits, as Spotify and Deezer don't have everything I want to listen to, and unlike Grooveshark, they don't allow me to add my own music.
Even though I could through a minor effort, take my entire back catalogue of MP3’s (many were pirated and very clearly sorted and organized), pirate a bunch of new content, and upload it all to a streaming service like Google Play Music, I don’t because then I would be missing out on killer curation and discovery features music services offer today.
However, I would still rather use Spotify than go through the bother of downloading dodgy MP3s and synching them to all my devices. I think Spotify's model killed music piracy much more than legal action ever did.