The music industry has been focused on the wrong thing for so long. Piracy isn't the problem; the problem is their lack of attention to the changing business model. Between iTunes (single track buys), streaming (just listen withoutout paying anyone), and sharing, the move has been away from albums and over to songs. Instead of the default buy being a full CD (or going back further, the LP), it's now the track. The industry is returning to the era of the 45, but without the 45. Just look at the revenue stats:

Legal digital sales are also seeing an unprecedented boom, although sales are far from making up from the shortfall created by the collapse of the physical market. Digital singles were up 41.5% in 2008, while physical singles sales plunged 43.5%, according to the BPI. Last year three albums -- Coldplay's Viva La Vida, Kings of Leon's Only By Night and Duffy's Rockferry -- sold more than 100,000 digital copies, and the impact of digital is nowhere more apparent than in the UK singles top 40, where Michael Jackson has 12 posthumous entries in the current chart.

This is what the industry has been ignoring - while they toss lawsuits in a vain attempt to preserve the jobs of a raft of useless middlemen, things continue to slip from their grasp.

What's happening in music in analagous to what's happened in any number of large scale manufacturing industries: the need for staff has been dramatically reduced by a confluence of events: more highly automated manufacturing on the one hand, and a complete disintermediation of information spreading on the other. It's a perfect storm, and the music sector's form of denial has been lawsuits. Other industries have responded with attempts to somehow shield the workforce from technological downsizing. In the end, it's all in vain, and the best management can do is to identify the business model change early and adapt to it.