I’ve noticed that many discussions about digital music, the struggles of the recording industries, etc, often are centered more on various individual’s ideological beliefs around music, more than they're on the economic issues facing the recording industry.
Some people hate pop music and want the major record companies to go away, and the industry to be dominated by indie labels producing less commercial music.
Some people just think music should be free
Other folks just hate the record companies perhaps because of their tactics against downloaders, or they hate pop music, how little they pay the artists, etc, etc.
Some folks love digital music and just want the record companies to go on board with it and stop complaining, and continue to embrace and expand upon the trend that started with Napster.
A common thread through all of the various viewpoints is the idea that the old model is dead, the record companies are dying, CDs are dead and a new model is needed.
The problem with the ideological discussions is that it ignores the fact that in one way or another, all music fans are tied into the old model in some way and have something to lose if the record companies are unable to adapt.
Better yet, few people really think about how the old model is driving the new one.
While the old model doesn’t work anymore and is indeed dying, it still created the content, developed the artists and marketed the pop music that drove the demand for iTunes, filesharing, Mp3 players, etc, etc. Without the old model spending decade after decade producing content, iTunes and Rhapsody wouldn't exactly have much content to sell to people. With so many things still being driven by the content generated by the old model, some thought needs to be given to what happens if the model goes away and the content pipeline dries up.
The current digital music revolution doesn’t exist in a vacuum that makes it immune to the record industry’s struggles.
In other words it's somewhat disingenuous to download the latest track from Lil' Wayne and decry the old model, when the old model produced the very song you're downloading to your iPod.
