Music intellectual property in the New Digital Age

This post by Atrios and its sequel match my views pretty well:

It's bizarre to me that an industry notorious for its payola scandals - paying radio stations to p[l]ay their crap so that people can hear it for free - simultaneously obsesses about the possibility that people might actually throw up a song on the internet so that people can hear it for free. It's called promotion.

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The point is simply that the industry has spent the last decade or so focused on trying to maintain their old marketing/distribution models instead of recognizing the new reality and figuring out how to exploit it. That may, in fact, involve giving away lots of content for free. Or maybe not. But radio stations have been giving away content for free for decades, sometimes after large checks were written to them by record companies.