Internet: Death of a Dinosaur

Music may well be the food of love, but in any case, it’s penetrating every consumer medium with any mass-market appeal. We buy CDs and play them on our stereos; we listen to the radio while we eat breakfast, and while we drive our cars. We go to concerts. The papers are full of music news and charts, MTV and VH1 bring us music videos 24/7, and soundtracks are vital and integral part of movies. And increasingly, we are consuming music through the Internet. Some of it in legal ways, a lot of it ripped from a CD and posted on the Web, in newsgroups, through I.R.C. chat rooms, or distributed through file-sharing networks. The music biz is scared out of its collective wits. So how can the Internet become a good, safe marketplace for record labels, musicians, and consumers?