I find it funny there is a music industry at all. A music INDUSTRY really only existed for 20 years: mid-50s to mid 70s and from the mid 70s the industry, was and remains, the equivalent of the walking dead. Combine payola and terrible product and outside of a few blips (Thriller or Nirvana) it has been dead.

Digitization of music saved the music industry and now they want to contain and control it. Digitization allowed the industry to repackage and resell the same product they released on LPs, cassettes, and 8-tracks, now on CDs – how many times do we replace our music catalog until we say, “enough”!

Since the birth of recorded music, the industry is revived each and every time by an artist or genre out of their control. This century .3% of new music accounts for >50% of annual sales, not too much artist development in that model. There is no music industry, it is a distribution industry made up of followers trying to create business model. The music only made them money when the industry acted as the gatekeepers and when they controlled distribution.

The greatest result of this shake up is that no longer will an artist have a gatekeeper to the fan. The web has destroyed distribution costs and the artist does not need to rely on a record deal pipe dream as the only way to get studio time, packaging, marketing (radio and press), and retail distribution.

The music industry has been on life support since lawyers and accountants started moving up the executive ranks their role is compliance, not business strategy.

Your analogy to the encyclopedia is an accurate evolution for that product and the publishing industry is trying to understand their model, just as the movie studios are.

Artists, go direct! Sorry Mr. Quirk, if you can’t understand your market, you should not be in business, it’s called competition.