If you can't beat 'em, join 'em!

"I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again."
Oscar Wilde, Irish dramatist, novelist, & poet (1854 - 1900)

The last fifteen years have seen more mayhem in the music industry than all the preceding years put together. The shift from cassettes to CDs and rising CD sales, followed by the sharp decline in sales with the advent of P2P file sharing and some reassuring albiet miniscule boost to sales in recent years. None of these phases has had any predictive bearing on the succeeding one resulting in huge swings in the fortunes of the various stakeholders. The very media moghuls who minted millions in the first half of this period suffered heavy losses as they helplessly watched while billions of mp3 files exchanged hands with absolutely no revenues to the industry.

The natural human reaction to disoder is control and the music industry behaved similarly. Lawsuits and regulation followed and DRM technologies have been hot for some time. But in the long run, none of these measures are going to prove to be a sustainable attack on the illegal 'arm' of the business. Every copyright law has a loophole waiting to be cashed on, every regulatory system is limited in effectiveness and every DRM initiative will be broken.
The future, then, lies not in regulation but in innovation: in giving the users the freedom that they have with free music and creating innovative revenue models to sustain such efforts. Regulation is important, yes, but is mere fire-fighting at best. If the music industry is to prosper in the future, the answer lies in innovative business models using the very means that was used against them: digital and online music, same ol'' wine in a brand new skin. It's high time they stopped rewriting the comma.