Going back to the discussion abotu the changes in the music industry, I recently read an article that had a different take on the record company woes (actually it was an ebook, and a very interesting one, I thought. It's free, and you can get it here). It said that the real reason the record companies are struggling isn't the loss of sales to downloading, but rather the increased competition due to the disappearance of scarcity. The basic argument is that under the old business model, there was limited shelf space and so consumers had a limited range of choice when it came to spending their music budget. On the Internet, however, no such scarcity exists. So the field of choices for consumers is expanding exponentially, including not only the traditional major label stuff, but also the entire historical catelog of major label stuff as well as a huge array of indepent label material. On the web, it is never necessary to take something off the shelf to make room for something else. So the big releases by the major lables will still sell well, but they are now competing with a much larger selection of current and historical choices, and so their sales naturally decline. I'm about half way through this book, and I'm finding it extremely interesting, and full of cool websites that I should probably have already known about. It's just one more of an increasing number of things that make me feel old!