how does a business get paid when they fuck up and have to take a loss. How does a business get paid when they have no customers, this is literally rolled into the economics. There are very few situations where this should be a problem, unless you're withholding some draconian amount of control over the media.

If you're mega corpo billion dollar industry collapses because it can't release products that people won't pay for, that doesn't exactly sound like my problem.

Everybody needs money to live. A lot of people are fine paying a bit of money to get access to media they like. Not everyone though, and you know what? That's ok, it's free marketing. A commonly reiterated statement is that people who pirate things, aren't people who are going to pay for something to begin with. However they are significantly more likely to pay for it after the fact. Or for future releases coming from the same entity. It's still net positive income at the end of the day. Most people don't want .WAV files, or .MKVs they want to watch the content. And that's what they'll do.