Of course we all know the answer.  The music industry has been living on borrowed time since the 80s, perpetrating what is essentially massive organized price fixing and trampling over the rights of artists and music listeners to line the pockets of a few undeserving music executives.  They need to understand that they have ZERO right to the money they've been making (whyere the hell is the JD?!?), and the market will no longer support their ridiculous connivings.

Hell, bands have been complaining about the labels ripping them off since the 70s.

My opinion on this: a lot of people are jumping on the "evil record companies"-bandwagon to try to justify their piracy.

-Florence Ballard from The Supremes was on welfare when she died.

-Collective Soul earned almost no money from "Shine," one of the biggest alternative rock hits of the '90s, when Atlantic Records paid almost all of their royalties to an outside production company.

-Country music legend Merle Haggard, with 37 top-10 country singles (including 23 #1 hits), never received a record royalty check until he released an album on the indie punk-rock label Epitaph.

With the explosion of the Internet and the ease of downloading music onto your computer, a whole new royalty arena has opened up in recent years. Record companies usually treat downloads as "new media/technology," which means they can reduce the royalty by 20% to 50%. This means that rather than paying artists a 10% royalty on recording sales, they can pay them a 5% to 8% rate when their song is downloaded from the Internet. In the case of downloaded music, although there is no packaging expense, many record company contracts still state that the 25% packaging fee will be deducted.

And I think many of those people have no idea about the economics of selling music...

States settle CD price-fixing case
By David Lieberman, USA TODAY
NEW YORK — The five largest music companies and three of the USA's largest music retailers agreed Monday to pay $67.4 million and distribute $75.7 million in CDs to public and non-profit groups to settle a lawsuit led by New York and Florida over alleged price-fixing in the late 1990s.

Attorneys general in the two states, who were joined in the lawsuit by 39 other states, said that the industry kept consumer CD prices artificially high between 1995 and 2000 with a practice known as "minimum-advertised pricing" (MAP).

The settlement will go to all 50 states, based on population. Consumers may be able to seek compensation.

Under MAP, the record companies subsidized ads by retailers in return for agreement by the stores to sell CDs at or above a certain price.

"This is a landmark settlement to address years of illegal price-fixing," New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer said in a statement. "Our agreement will provide consumers with substantial refunds and result in the distribution of a wide variety of recordings for use in our schools and communities."

The companies, including Universal Music, Sony Music, Warner Music, Bertelsmann's BMG Music and EMI Group, plus retailers Musicland Stores, Trans World Entertainment and Tower Records, admitted no wrongdoing.

The companies have not practiced the pricing agreement since 2000. At that time, they agreed in settling a complaint by the Federal Trade Commission that they would refrain from MAP pricing for seven years.

Former FTC chairman Robert Pitofsky said at the time that consumers had been overcharged by $480 million since 1997 and that CD prices would soon drop by as much as $5 a CD as a result.