Spoilers: Everyone that says pirating is stealing needs to get back to economy and marketing 101. The only way it would actually be remotely possible to "lose" a sale is if someone bought the game with store credit, went home, didn't open the game or install it, downloaded, installed and played a copy from TPB and the likes and THEN returned the unopened game for full credit back. Until then, nothing was lost, as they didn't receive any money in the first place. And unless they somehow had millions of signed contracts from people all over the world guaranteeing they'd buy the next album/game, arguing "but we predicted this many sales!11" amounts to predicting tomorrow's lottery numbers and complain when you don't win the top prize.
Likewise, internet "pirates" are just the new scapegoats of several industries that need someone to blame for their lousy quality. In the 80s, the tape recorder was the bad guy because it allowed you to record music off the radio, and back then the music industry declared it would be dead in a few years if it kept going. Repeat for first being able to burn cds in the 90's, to Napster, to the current torrent system. The fact is that they have NEVER sold more cds or games than they do now. Just take a note of how many times per year the record for "most albums sold in a week/month" is broken and how many games go gold (this is also based on pre-orders), get Game of the Year editions, expansion packs etc. that would not be possible through lousy sales.
Their actual problem is two-fold, if you ask me: First of all, the overall quality is lousy in the extreme. How many of your albums do you actually listen to, full length, today? Good artists are definitely out there, which brings me to the second problem they have: Everyone and their mother does it today. American Idol, X-Factor, America's got talent and so on and so on for every single country on Earth (no, really, even Afghanistan has X-Factor or Idol, I can't remember which). ALL of these have to have an album made for the winner, regardless of actual talent. Then there are also thousands upon thousands of tiny studios/record companies that all need artists to stay afloat. When was the last time you could mention a few thousand rock stars? The exact same thing applies for games: There are untold amounts of 5-people game developers around and they're just not good enough to make the next Starcraft or DOOM or Baldur's Gate.
Tl; dr: They are flooding an oversaturated market with thousands of products of questionable quality, making the ones that are actually GOOD sell less than they might be able to because people are simply sick and tired of the general level of quality. It's getting so bad it's like asking you to buy vegetables from a single farmer out of the millions of farms around the world: To the average person, there's simply no difference between the vegetables, and it applies to music and games too. Why buy Game 1 when there's also Game 2, Game 3 and Game 37637823628 to choose between? And why buy Britney when you can buy Aguilera, the latest Idol/X-Factor/Whatever winner and so on.
