JT Woodruff made me do it.

I'm all for full albums and artwork, but at the end of the day it's about the music and the physical form began to die with Napster. No matter what labels or artists want, digital media is so much a part of the society now; it's easier to distribute and handle. It's permanent and it's infinitely replicable. Nevertheless, the father of MP3 will be around for a while, and I do agree that in most cases a disc for $10 is a good price.

When it comes to licensing music for video games and commercials, this is a double-edged sword. How many of you have listened to a band because you were introduced to that band by Tony Hawk's Pro Skater or Rock Band, an Apple commercial or YouTube. I know I'm not alone here. Goldfinger, Primus, Less Than Jake, and others would have never had such a formidable existence in my musical upbringing without this brilliant use of product placement. Sure, it decreases the "music for music's sake" value, but that's a latent force. Businesses using music to more effectively sell their products are like new quasi-record labels. A taste of the art, none of the baggage. You see the commercial, you play the game, you buy the music.

In this digital age, the biggest problem is the legal distribution model. Why do we download albums for free on P2P sites? Well, because they're free of course. But also because it takes less than a minute to download an entire album and these file sharing sites deliver top-notch quality, reward us for sharing, and best of all--we can have it a couple weeks or months before anyone else. The minute someone (read: industry at large) jumps on this, legalizes it, and charges a reasonable subscription fee is the minute I sign on.

To make a legal (paid) P2P service even more rewarding for its members--it'll have to be to survive--uploading/seeding bonuses could be given some redeemable value, so users can continue to feel like empowered members of a community. It would help, of course, if all other (free) alternatives dropped out of existence at the same time, but at some point the listener has to make a choice to go 'legit' and re-establish his or her own understanding of art's value. Until then, the free service is superior and will remain so ad infinitum.

Labels are scared right now. It's sad, but they're scared of us. The digital era has robbed them of their control. This is why they are recklessly signing half-baked and copy-cat acts. Change the distribution model, establish proper revenue streams for bands that deserve it, and broken will be easily fixed. Anyone catch the irony in that homage?