salon is talking about napster and the ways that it may or may not change the music industry:
“Over time, though, I think that a growing number of artists will question their own participation in a system that really doesn’t serve the great majority of them. They’ll begin to experiment with more direct sell-more-T-shirts approach mocked by artists in our article last week, but serious new ideas for generating revenue for musicians: ideas like annual fan subscriptions, charges for early access to
new music or special deals on collector’s items, using online networking to boost attendance at shows and no doubt many others that I can’t yet imagine.”
i agree that in the long term this might happen to a certain degree – napster will ‘prevail’, but undoubtably the industry will eventually figure out how to deal with it and resume business as usual. just look at electronic book market for a lessons.