Because songs are small chunks of information that many people want, music was the canary in the digital coal mine, presaging what would happen to other art forms as Internet connections spread and sped up. For the old recording business everything went wrong. Sales of CDs have dropped by nearly half since 2000, while digital sales of individual songs haven’t come close to compensating. Movies and television (and journalism too) are now scrambling not to become the next victims of an omnivorous but tight-fisted Internet.
By now, in 2010, we’re all geeks, conversant with file formats and software players. Our cellphone/camera/music player/Web browser gadgets fit in a pocket, with their little LCD screens beckoning. Their tiny memory chips hold collections of music equivalent to backpacks full of CDs. The 2000s were the broadband decade, the disintermediation decade, the file-sharing decade, the digital recording (and image) decade, the iPod decade, the long-tail decade, the blog decade, the user-generated decade, the on-demand decade, the all-access decade. Inaugurating the new millennium, the Internet swallowed culture whole and delivered it back — cheaper, faster and smaller — to everyone who can get online.
via nytimes.com