Fiddling while the Industry Burns

Atrios has a pair of posts on how badly the music industry has been doing over the past couple of years. His analysis:

"Instead of exploiting the desire of people on the internet to promote their stuff for free, they're obsessed with royalties and DRM. It's bizarre to me that an industry notorious for its payola scandals - paying radio stations to pay their crap so that people can hear it for free - simultaneously obsesses about the possibility that people might actually throw up a song on the internet so that people can hear it for free."

I'd never thought of music sharing in the context of payola, but it's a hell of a contradiction, isn't it? Besides, these days so much of radio is repression by boredom - but maybe that's what the industry wants. There's no reason to embed this video here: