Taylor Swift has made around $340 million on her 10 albums. If she never made another one, I think she should be able to stay out of the bread lines even if someone downloaded a few free MP3s. Actually the Napster guy had it right. "When they make music easier to buy than it is to steal, people will buy it" and the fact is, artists make more money selling MP3s than they ever did selling bits of plastic. Basically once they get out of the studio, it is just a computer trick. No CD factory, no distribution network and no stores to share profits with,. They sign up with a bunch of computer companies like Apple or Amazon and cash the checks. Some of these people do not even have conventional studios. They record their voice on a laptop in the basement and add the band in electronically. (many times "stealing" samples from other recordings to build the "band").
Stealing MP3s these days is akin to when we used to sit by the radio with a tape recorder "stealing" songs. Most people would rather give I-tunes or Amazon a half a buck and not have to screw with it to get a mediocre copy.