@ Cameron
I heartily agree.
the whole p2p fiasco is meerley a sideshow to distract the low-brow media from the fact that people are simply not willing to fork out for the re-hashed crap that the members of the BPI and RIAA are churning out.
Personally, I want to see Time Warner, Sony, BMG et al forced out of the music industry. Then hopefully the quality of content should dramatically improve as the Indies start to regain their rightful shares of the market.
We seem to forget that the mass market music industry is a flash in the pan. Manufactured bands were lapped up by punters who didn't know any better ever since Motown and some of the early fifties 'rock' bands.
We all remember the select few classics that survived, but if you were to collect all the tracks from the top 40 when that said track was released, you would be hard pushed to tell the difference between the majority of the rubber-stamped chords and rifts.
The big money part of the music biz was always going to be a flash in the pan, as the very tech that enabled such a biz, also spelled its downfall even back then, as it gave consumers greater choice.
It's simply that the tech saturation has reached the point where the savy consumer doesn't want to give out all his dosh for the musical equivelent of battleship grey wallpaper