I'm gonna play devil's advocate here for just a minute. Granted, 99% of everything the music "industry" puts out is crap, but everyone has a different chosen "good" one percent.

I am, myself, eclectic. My CD changer has in it, right now, The soundtrack to "Lost Boys", "Vintage Children's Favourites", and the King Singers. And it was the evil music industry that made them all available to me. Maybe not all for a reasonable price, (I thought CD's were supposed to get cheaper???) but the existence of the music industry guarantees that I can walk into a place like Tower Records and find a broad variety of music.

The trouble with "narrowcasting" music, the way that the internet does, is that we will mostly find what we already like. What chance would I have of stumbling over the Pizzicato Five at Mudcat?

And commmercialized music has a function. Folk Rock on the radio in the sixties, made it easier for our teachers in school to teach us real folk songs. Especially when we had gotten to be teenagers and needed to be cool. Mitch Miller on tv gave us a large shared repertoire that made it possible to have sing-alongs at church picnics.

I'm all for a shorter copyright period and better tracking of use during it, though. There should be profit for the artists. But the middlemen get too much of it.