I think the idea of blithely accepting the death of the music industry as we know it and and embracing the alleged democratizing cultural utopia of p2p sharing is as short sighted as the major labels who tried to fight back the online tide with lawyers. Tarring all record labels as shadowy middlemen with their hand in the artists back pocket and associating them all with the excess & greed of major labels is deeply unfair and is one of the straw men that prevents these discussions from ever getting off the ground (see also home taping, second hand, "it's "inevitable", it's "theft", "art for the people", dowloaders are "criminals" etc etc). Digitalisation is not progress by definition and no other industry illustrates this like the music industry. Trying to hang on to the physical form is not some hippy pipedream - it is an absolutely practical response to a chronic dilution of the form which is one of the reasons that vinyl is returning with such a (limited) vengeance
But there is nothing to fight as far as downloading goes. It has all the contradictory hallmarks of the war on drugs and the same doomed bravado of those leading it. All you can do is educate people of the long-term practical benefits of contributing to the arts in tandem with file-sharing and make the physical product something truly worth owning so that the two forms compliment each other instead of these baffling & regressive ideas that the internet simply steamrolls all that came before it or that what came before must fight the internet with all its might.
But there is nothing to fight as far as downloading goes. It has all the contradictory hallmarks of the war on drugs and the same doomed bravado of those leading it. All you can do is educate people of the long-term practical benefits of contributing to the arts in tandem with file-sharing and make the physical product something truly worth owning so that the two forms compliment each other instead of these baffling & regressive ideas that the internet simply steamrolls all that came before it or that what came before must fight the internet with all its might.