Oh - yeah sorry that may have come out backward, I was positing the other side of the piracy thing. It is dual aspect which is more what I mean when I say double-edged.
Like you say it can expose people to content they may never have seen/discovered without it, and they may choose to support it.
At the same time just because someone is pirating, doesnt mean that if I waged war on changing the password every three days they would instead choose to sub, most would just move on and not bother.
Yeah, changing the password in short intervals would probably bother the supporters much more than the pirates, just like most DRM methods do in gaming. But I think most people aren't pirating and are actually willing to pay if the price and especially the service is good and fair.
Take GOG for example, their business model wouldn't work at all if there were more people pirating than paying, because none of the games on their platform have any DRM at all. You can also easily abuse the service of GOG, for example by buying a game, downloading the offline installer and instantly refunding while keeping the game files. Bam, you just got a game for free. Or buying and downloading, finish the game and than refund it since they give you 2 weeks to refund no matter how long you played, unlike Steam where you only get 2 hours until you can't refund anymore.
Yes, I'm pirating a lot myself, why else would I be on this forum, but I'm always buying a game if I really enjoy it. I'm basically just using piracy to get an extended demo and that not only saved me a lot of money but also a lot of stress and anger. You can't get every game on GOG and the 2 hours at Steam are often not enough time to test a game.
Sorry for the wall of text.