"Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that the music industry screwed itself by raising rates until they all but killed the most profitable, popular and legit outlet they had?"

This may be the case. But, I don't believe that people pirating music ever wanted to actually buy the music. You can now get 99 cent songs without DRM and there are tons of services like Pandora, Grooveshark, and Last.fm (where you can preview entire songs before buying). Both of these were points brought up as a reason for piracy around the time of Napster. Piracy is still worse than ever.

I'm still waiting for the new set of excuses.

You get punished for being an honest customer.

I bought a game a while back. It refused to install because of some broken StarForce DRM. Sure, I should've researched the game first to avoid that notoriously bad DRM, but it was an impulse buy. That's another way they're killing themselves; it's a real pain to have to research everything instead of buying whatever looks fun.

Alas, the only good brands I know of these days are PopCap and GoodOldGames, which are great, but that really limits what you can buy.

So I wasted a lot of time for nothing by trying to pay the artists. And no, I didn't pirate the damn game even though I should've been entitled to, I just wasted a ton of time.

Punish people like that enough and you won't have any customers left. People respond in kind. They don't care about your beef with the pirates, but they do care about getting hurt in the crossfire.