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Let's look at Metallica's sales:
Kill em All (1983) - 3,000,000
Ride the Lightening (1984) - 5,000,000
Master of Puppets (1986) - 6,000,000
Garage Days (1987) - 1,000,000
Justice for All (1998) - 8,000,000
Metallica (1991) - 14,000,000
Load (1996) - 5,000,000
Reload (1997) - 3,000,000
Garage Inc (1998) - 2,500,000
S&M (1999) - 2,500,000
St. Anger (2003) - 2,000,000
Death Magnetic (2008) - 2,000,000
Feel free to argue that Metallica's sales would have been significantly different since 1996 or so, but I argue that this is just what a 30 year old band's sales look like. You wipe out piracy and these guys aren't going to sell 3 million CDs.
For the sake of fairness I will also include the Wikipedia page. I normally avoid it, but it has interesting numbers. It shows that in many countries Metallica sells as many CDs as they ever did regardless of piracy. All this kills the "people won't buy what they can get for free" theory.
Let's for once have a discussion of this instead of knee jerk reactions.
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