What happens to a market when new technology enables goods and services to be distributed in a completely new way?

For a century or so, the life of a home listener was simple: you had your disks, whether in the form of cylinders, 78s, LPs, or CDs, and, no matter how many of them piled up, there was a clear demarcation between the music that you had and the music that you didn’t. The Internet has removed that distinction. Near-infinity awaits on the other side of the magic rectangle.

This market was previously locked up to huge record industries who forced taxes on recordable cassettes and practically owned every big artist on the scene with years-long contracts. When the MP3 format arrived and audio equipment on the computer became cheap, just about anyone could record a decent album in their bedroom and promote it online.

But the market never took that new step that we all thought it would, because the record industry chose to wage war against the phenomenon (Napster) instead of adopting its methods, refining them, and profiting from them. Today classical lovers like Alex Ross and I can go online and order lossless versions of old Beethoven recordings, but the piracy meme has already become a culture.

I'm not really into piracy, but can't say I'm totally against it either. It's similar to being "against" alcohol and drugs, which from a larger view doesn't make much practical sense. Piracy filled the void in the market that otherwise could have been market shares owned by the music industry. This is what happens when you don't adapt to the current environment, but think you can dominate it and go back in time to when you were happy and rich. It never works, it only makes you bitter and poor, in every thinkable way.