If you're not a potential customer, and don't share the media, copyright holder et al have lost nothing. If you do share, they're out whatever percentage of people who you passed the data to that were potential customers.
If I own something via other distribution channels or physical media, I have no compunction against downloading, nor if I know I will never pay for it otherwise. I have on occasion tried out software I've pirated and paid for a real license after continued use, or purchased physical media despite having the album or movie from a torrent. I have to assume that I'm not an outlier, so it occurs to me that piracy may actually be a net positive influence on media companies revenue. The marketing of content is good in terms of exposure, software reviews and recommendation, and so forth.
It may actually be a social good, depending on the culture at the time, creating more free channels of distribution and communication about content products, and services that otherwise wouldn't exist or would be stifled.
It's not theft. At worst it's cheating at the game of commerce.
Especially this part. Spotify in particular is bad this way, with the artists getting a nearly invisibly small slice of the money. Youtube isn't much better. Reduce the friction that prevents me from giving my money directly to the artists to support their work and I'd be a much bigger paying consumer of online media.
The search there isn't great but I find a huge % of things I'm interested in come up on a websearch for: artistname albumname bandcamp
P2P can't be 100% leeches, so the lawyers always have plenty of people to go after.
To get to the tech savvy folks, they tear down VPNs and force the hands of ISPs.
Can we avoid the conflation of piracy and stealing? Stealing under the pre-internet definition has very different consequences from the duplication of copyable resources.