The only thing propping it up thus far are multi-album recording contracts.

A friend of mine moved to LA and recently got his band signed to a record label. He contends that the major factor propping them up at the moment is ringtones, of all things.

The use of smallpox as a biological weapon was. While other diseases had been used as bioweapons before (catapulting corpses killed via the black death in seiges, for example) the absence of immunity to smallpox among native Americans made it very effective. Also, the natives hadn't used biological weaponry.

to the jobs of blacksmiths, to the jobs of chimney sweeps, to the jobs of telegraph operators, to the jobs of steam ship engineer

Umm those jobs still exist. I know a lot of blacksmiths, know a few Chimney sweeps. well no telegraph, but I do know atleast 2 steam ship operators.

The control of media means more money for the record company.

When I ran the music department of an independent store, I learned first-hand just how much control they exercise over the music industry. I knew six months in advance what songs were going to make the charts, because those songs were the ones the labels pushed off on radio stations. The line from the salesman would sound something like this:

"This is the next album from Blonde Dance Clone #4. Tracks 5 and 8 are going to be all over the radio before it comes out, and 5 will probably be in the top 10. We plan to have five million copies distributed for release. We've got endcaps, freestanding displays, placards, hanging signs, and posters. Later we'll have a pile of promotional goodies."

What downloads do to that industry even with no impact on sales is they make demand less predictable, which means their margins are reduced. That's what scared them from the start...the loss of their ability to dictate our tastes in music and control the top 40 charts. Napster especially meant that they could no longer shove their choice of music down our throats via radio because radio was no longer a primary source of new music for millions of users.

A record label that sells hundreds of millions of albums a year doesn't care about someone who might move 10,000 or even 50,000. It's not even that an artist wouldn't make money that they don't sign them...it's that the artist wouldn't make *enough*

If the mindset in the article were to be believed, the large companies would be blindly signing literally everybody who made music so it could control them.

If course, that's only true if signing a band or musician has zero overhead. If there's a cost to the label for each signing, then they have finite capacity, and will want to pick and choose.

There's also scarcity economics at work at this level as well. If every high school wannabe rock band had a contract with EMI or Sony BMG, then the perceived value of that contract would plummet. Similarly, if every museo you met had a contract, and was nevertheless practically penniless, then no one at all would sign up, since they'd be taking on obligations with no expectation of recompense.

In the last couple of years with GarageBand etc providing the ability for anyone to make reasonable music at home

It's even cheaper than that. The cost barrier to entry is effectively *nothing*, now. Go round your area on bin night. It's fairly likely that eventually you'll find a PC lying on the pavement to be picked up by the bin men. Take it home, nuke and pave, and stick Ubuntu Studio or similar on it. There you go, you can make music. Maybe not as quickly or easily as people using expensive paid-for commercial software on high-end computers, but it's enough to get started.

If the major record labels do fall, that would great for broadcast radio.

There was an alternative rock radio station that started up in my hometown when I was in high school that was owned by the same media group that owned the major classic rock station. For the first month or so, this new station had no airtime sold, so they played no commercials, and they played great mixes all month. After word had gotten out that there was a cool new radio station, they started selling air time. Fast forward a few years, and they became completely unlistenable. They played the same handful of songs on heavy rotation and completely destroyed any loyalty I had to them from when the stationed first started.

Without major labels pushing they're "new discoveries", the station might actually be free to play a good mix again. Same goes for all stations playing new music. There will still be a market for radio, but the stations might actually be able to choose their own mix to play. And if a station feels it's niche is playing music that's generic enough for everyone, then so be it, but at least there won't be a hidden agenda for the station to push shi**y music to sell more records.

I'm 55 and still listen to the music I liked 20, 30 and more years ago, and I'm not the only one. While many of the artists that produced that music are retired, dead or just not interested in being in the business, I'd still be BUYING similar music if someone would make it, produce it and make it available for download so I could put it on my MP3 player, in my car or office player - just like I used to do with my vinyl before the digital age.

I've said it before on here and it's worth repeating - the music and movie industries are leaving a whole lot of money on the table by not marketing to the over 40 audience. We bought the hot stereos, put them in our dorm rooms, later in our cars and apartments. We didn't stop loving the music - it stopped loving us, or more correctly, the industry ignored us. We've got the dough, we own iPods and all kinds of digital stuff. Now we need legal, quality content. The business may never be like the old days, and that's probably a good thing, but there is a business if some smart 20-something wants to be the next digital millionaire. The music and movie industries will be in their final death twitch asking "what the hell happened?" and we'll be saying "you didn't sell to your long time loyal customers, you jerks". Hell, even my parents' generation got more attention from the music industry than us boomers do. All the Sinatra, Bennett and Welk albums in my collection came from them.

So, if you're going to hang out on my lawn, I'll provide the suds and dig out the old Harmon Kardon stereo but you bring some good vinyl and we'll have a hell of a party.

   

I always thought that the main problem the RIAA had with downloaders was their reluctance to perform the first part of that process

Then you thought wrong. For every major label artist there are a thousand local bands, these days all of whom have CDs full of original music and quite a few (my friend Joe Frew, for example) who have told the labels to go fuck themselves when they were flashed one of the insulting contracts they wave in musicians' faces.

The New World Order is more interested in control than in money. Money is just one means of control they use. This is why, for example, they hate Google Book Search. Google Book Search is very lucrative to Random House (Bertelsmann), but it threatens big publishing's control over what information gets disseminated by the public. Giving people better tools to find older, published material has the danger of people breaking from from the NWO's brainwashing.