Via Slashdot, here’s a lenthy and insightful article on the music industry from that pillar of respectability, the Economist. It features this tasty quote:
According to an internal study done by one of the majors, between two-thirds and three-quarters of the drop in sales in America had nothing to do with internet piracy. No-one knows how much weight to assign to each of the other explanations: rising physical CD piracy, shrinking retail space, competition from other media, and the quality of the music itself. But creativity doubtless plays an important part.
A recurring theme throughout the article is the growing power of independent music companies. This immediately reminded me of Chris Anderson’s excellent article on The Long Tail of the entertainment industry.
On a related note, Freedom to Tinker has some interesting thoughts on Bittorrent’s reciprocal nature.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
i don’t think that the music industry is actually going down it’s just that people’s expectations for popular artists like beyonce, akon, p!nk and other artists releasing cd’s around this time are SO SKY HIGH that even with a perfect album the public would be dissapointed. they want 12 Billboard hot 100 hits on each album and when they don;t get that they moan and groan and say how the album is flopp because it only produced one billboard top 100 song. THAT IS GOOD! 5 years ago these albums would have gotten all positive reviews but nowadays people are looking at albums so critically and expecting so much they won’t ever get their expectations. the music industry hasn;t gone down just that people’s expectations have gone way way way to hight up!
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