Death of the music industry

Thom Yorke has predicted the death of the music industry.
The 41-year-old Radiohead frontman - who split from record label EMI in 2007 after recording six albums - has advised aspiring musicians to try and make it on their own, rather than sign a deal with a major company.
Here's a prediction: Years from now, historians will point to the late spring of 2010 as the time when physical sales of music entered the terminal stage of its illness. Here's why.
Album sales collapsed catastrophically in May. For the week ending May 30, only 4,984,000 albums were sold in all of America. That's new releases AND catalogue titles sold by everyone from Wal-Mart on down. It's estimated that sales haven't sucked this much since sometime in the 1970s. Compare that to the good ol' days of December 2000 when 45.4 million albums moved out of stores in a single week.
It's been a perfect storm, really. A lack of major releases combined with increasing interest in a la carte digital sales (i.e. a preference to buy individual songs rather than full albums) has created a negative vector. Add in the ever-present boogieman of illegal downloading and we have fewer and fewer people buying music on CD. Even the reborn vinyl craze can't help.
And although we may see seasonal spikes in physical album sales for a few years, there are other things conspiring to kill off the CD.
Despite all the attempts to make legal downloads more appealing and the crackdown on music pirating, 300 million songs were downloaded illegally in Germany alone in 2008. According to the report, private copying remains the biggest problem that the recording industry is facing besides illegally downloaded music. In 2008, 26.2 billion music files, some legal and some illegal, could be found on hard drives, MP3 players and cell phones.

"We're dealing with an industry that is slowly but surely dying, every day. There's the record companies that are mass-producing these versions of these unsigned artist; versions of this broken art. While it works, because it sells records, it damages the business."
They say we are in the information age and the time is now for you to act and make your dreams come true. Don't be a slave to the record labels and do all that you can do to live your dreams of music and fame. Your time is now! So we can keep the music playing.