There are already dozens of torrents with thousands of peers on The Pirate Bay. It doesn't really matter how hard it is, as long as a single individual can do it.
I think we're on the verge of a total shift back to the world of pre-CD burners where you simply had to pay 10-20 to listen to an album.
Before CD burners we had tapes. The logo of the music industry campaign against home taping is actually part of The Pirate Bay's: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Taping_Is_Killing_Music
...which were subject to generation loss. You had an incentive to buy albums you liked, because taping involved a loss of quality.
I also listen to a lot of Spotify every day at work but I never used to buy albums before. I do buy shirts and concert tickets from my favorite smaller bands (and back them on Kickstarter). So I guess the math comes down to, are there more people like me who used to pay 0$ for albums and now pays 120$ a year or people like you who used to buy lots of albums before.
I usually discover new music through SoundCloud and niche web sites. I buy music directly through services like Bandcamp. I make a conscious effort to find musicians and producers that I like and which have a low play count.
I started making electronic music 15 to 20 years ago. There's no way in hell I'd ever want to do this as a full time job and risk my livelihood on it. I know how time consuming the creation of a song or track can be. That's why I want to support people who have the guts to invest their very hearts and souls into such an endeavor, I'm way too big of a coward to ever do that.
People have such a strong sense of entitlement when it comes to music. They are too unimaginative to fill their own empty lives with meaning and require the imagination of other people to fill this void with 'content', and it better be free. Society is very ungrateful to most of the artists out there.
Why don't more artists take the Jay-Z approach? Build an app for your album, make people buy it, or sell it in bulk to a big brand like Samsung. This seems like a way for artists to take back the industry. Pirating music from a Jay-Z app seems much much harder than from a desktop. I think we're on the verge of a total shift back to the world of pre-CD burners where you simply had to pay 10-20 to listen to an album.
What am I missing?