What the traffic will bear: the music industry and peer to peer systems

You just can't emphasise enough just how broken the music industry's distribution model is. The average UK consumer, apparently the most voracious music buyer in the world, still only buys 3 albums a year. But the singles market, once the mainstay of the pop music industry, has all but collapsed. Who in their right mind would pay £4 for a single?

The music industry is one that believes that theirs is a premium product when the reality is that it's a disposable one.

Combine this with the structural changes inherent in the emergence of the internet - and lord knows we don't understand them at all, and combine them with the recognition of existence of the market's 'Long Tail'...

What we have here, if we're honest, is the conflation of technological developments [with the rise of P2P] and a widespread consumer dissatisfaction with the music industry [that was suppressed by the lack of viable alternatives that is a prescription for a cultural and economic train wreck.

Peer-to-peer [P2P] systems aren't going away - after all billionaire Mark Cuban is going to pay for Grokster's defense of P2P systems before the US Supreme Court tomorrow - and all these issues about access to goods and services [including access to unavailable goods, because much of what we want we can't get, and unaffordable goods, where we're not willing to pay the prices the industry sets] are going to be recurring themes in economics [and society, for that matter] for much of the remainder of this decade.