The number of consumers that pirated music increased mostly because the record companies missed the boat in the third round of being able to sell us the same music. They quite literally sat on their hands for years while there was huge demand for online music. iTunes finally served that demand and Apple made a bundle of money on that.

Before that CDs sold for twice the amount that the original records cost when they came out ('they will last forever, and they're as good as the original masters').

You seem to have a strong conviction that piracy killed the music industry but they didn't need our help to do so, the quality on offer went down, the back catalog is large enough to sustain you for a lifetime (or even longer) and given the choice between something modern and something old I find myself picking 'something old' more and more frequently. There are some exceptions, but these are happening with lower frequency every year. It's probably a function of getting older but I'd just as soon listen to an old record by Kate Bush, 10CC, or a classical recording from the 1950's or 60's than that I will listen to something new that doesn't register with me. I can't remember when I last had the radio on, the only one I have is in the car and I probably didn't even bother plugging in the antenna.

Piracy had absolutely nothing to do with it - for me. I spent a small fortune on music and would have been happy to continue to do so. But the innovators dilemma is harsh and the music industry was too caught up in combating piracy to see that installing root kits on people's computers (Sony) or suing your artists (everybody else) is bad policy for a middle man. And so they faded. A bit late, perhaps, but I think it was inevitable. The ones (labels, not artists) that survive into the streaming era are doing well enough financially, but the music they put out just isn't compelling to me.

To this day there is a levy on any storage medium that goes to the local equivalent of the RIAA.