Cory Doctorow is one of the most copyright reform-advocacy-minded people around, and he makes the opposite claim: [paraphrased] "the problem for independent artists isn't piracy, it's obscurity."

If A is the set of people that've heard of your product sans piracy, and B is the people that've heard of it after piracy, then the gap between B' that pirates and B had better be smaller than the gap between A and B. That's likelier for a tiny producer than a huge one.