Buying the albums mostly supports the music industry when you do the accounting and does little to support the actual band directly. The middlemen mostly exist

Buying the albums mostly supports the music industry when you do the accounting and does little to support the actual band directly. The middlemen mostly exist to build a machine to allow people to profit from music... Which is an arguable indirect benefit to the content producers. Yet it does lead to the counterintuitive situation where a merchandise buying pirate is actually directly contributing to a bands coffers more than a law abiding citizen may be.