That said:-
I think the complaints of the industry are a farce.
First they cleverly engineer future products to be "net" dependant.
Then the net and industry presents everybody with umpteen ways to download products "au gratis"
Then they whine about people doing it.
Hey "net" and "industry"....if you don't want people downloading stuff for free....then stop giving them so many ways to do it.
Who specifically are you referring to by "industry"? That's like railing against "the enemy" without ever specifying who you mean. If you're only talking about the major labels or big Internet companies, then you're missing the point: this trend hurts individual artists just as much (if not more).
And you talk as though "the industry" was aligned on the subject of online music. It isn't. Internet companies like Google are entirely interested in advertising revenue and could care less about copyright law unless it stops them from doing something that would attract eyeballs (e.g., YouTube). They dance on the edge of legality using teams of lawyers defending against lawsuits, and writing big lobbyist paychecks to keep politicians and the justice department out of their business.
Large labels like Sony and Universal care about copyright law only as it pertains to their gigantic back-catalogs, so they can keep the revenue stream coming in as long as possible. (75 years? 100 years? Even more??) They work with technology companies only when it suits their interests. Otherwise, they're just as likely to
sue the large tech companies for unlicensed use of music written and performed by someone who died 30 years ago.
And many of the technologies which facilitate content piracy (like BitTorrent) were certainly not "cleverly engineered" by "the industry". They were mainly developed by hackers and file-swappers, or have been completely transformed from original intent.
The Mp3 music format, for instance, only got really popular after the Winamp player became nearly universal in early 1997. It was originally just an audio codec standard for decoding audio streams embedded in MPEG videos, and wasn't even a standalone file format. No one in the industry had any idea that they were creating a standard that would take the entire industry by storm, and be embedded into every music device sold on the market. That happened in a completely unexpected and unplanned manner.
The only "cleverly engineered" mechanism I can think of really might be Apple's Fairplay, which is now defunct and therefore irrelevant anyway. In its original incarnation, it cleverly married Apple's interests (locking in customers to its devices and music store) with the label interests (content protection), yielding something that customers purchased despite the disadvantages. But it died under anti-competition lawsuit scrutiny eventually. (Ironically, the lawsuit I believe still lingers in the courts, years later...)
Anyway, the point is, "the industry" is not in alignment at all, the only attribute which all of these big companies share is a complete lack of empathy for individual songwriters and recording/performing artists.
But don't let your animosity towards the big companies detract you from the fact that lower music sales is bad for everybody involved in making music for a living. Yes, it's bad for the big music companies too. But ultimately, it's bad for the musicians.
