Don't worry too much about it, this will take care of itself soon enough. Give them enough rope and I'm sure they'll find a creative way to use it.

True to some degree. But, the magical thinking behind things like ASCAP/BMI isn't going to go away any time soon, despite the fact that the metrics by which those royalties are disbursed become less and less accurate every day and as the old music supply chains die. The entirety of the industry is bizarre from a modern perspective, not just the record labels and consumer music supply chain.

But, yes, the worst pieces of the puzzle are busy destroying themselves as we speak, and better solutions are bound to spring up.

I would like to change 'industry' to 'media industry', it's not just the record labels that have a problem.

The reason why books are not yet as much subject to copying as music and movies is because they're still distributed in a format that makes it reasonably hard to copy them. It actually takes some effort.

As soon as books become available widely in electronic formats (not just the select few that you can get for your kindle today, Amazon claims to have 300,000 titles available but there are substantially more books than that) and without DRM the publishers will be right up there on the barricades.

I don't think there has ever been a technology as disruptive to established businesses in terms of jobs and dollars as the internet has been to the media corporations.