Industry?

CANNES, France - After years of fighting the Wild West of freely downloaded music, the mainstream music industry welcomed a former desperado to their annual schmoozefest Monday, highlighting the difficulty of their search for a solution to plunging CD sales.

And that solution might be: give music away legally and find another way — such as advertising — to make money.

Participation was down at the annual MIDEM music business conference at the seaside resort of Cannes, reflecting the failure of digital music sales to make up for crumbling revenues and the billions of dollars being lost to music piracy — illegal downloads outnumber the number of tracks sold by a factor of 20 to 1 according to industry body IFPI.

I think a lot of people forget that music is an art form.. and there doesn't need to be any "industry" behind it. Art is subject to market forces as well, and the advent of the digital age has given the masses easy access to artists that the "industry" ignored previously. In short, there's a lot of music out there, and people are not willing to pay 16 bucks for a CD anymore... however a lot of people are willing to pay 100 bucks for a concert ticket. That's where the future is.. in expanded live multi-media style performance.

If I were a record industry executive.. I'd be looking for ways to get involved in the live side of music.. because that's never going to go away...

Hopefully, within the next couple years.. all music will be free to download.. but then we'll see the ISP's try to step in and get their cut because of the bandwidth implications. Hell, Comcast is already trying to do that by changing their pricing structures where it won't be based on your connection speed, but by your network utilization. That's pure crap. Using bandwidth doesn't cost anybody any money. It's there.. might as well use it.