The Case For Music (And Musicians) Over The Music Business

“As we listen these days to the cries of music-selling middlemen that those sweet songs of yesteryear will disappear in a world of unbridled file sharing, we need to remember that the interests of music professionals don’t necessarily coincide with the interests of music listeners. Sure, new technologies and ways of doing business have hurt many trades related to the music industry. There are many fewer people making a living as song pluggers, sheet music publishers, and the like. There are probably fewer professional live musicians than there would be if we had never enjoyed radios, jukeboxes, transistorized stereos, or computerized file sharing. Yet with every change, people’s access to better reproduced, more portable, more personalized music grows.”