Here's John Seabrook in a 7/11/2003 piece on the record industry.
On the subject of whether the record industry will survive there are optimists and pessimists. The optimists think record companies will eventually figure out how to sell music over the Internet, and when that happens the market for music will be three times bigger than it is now. The pessimists say that the industry has missed a crucial opportunity to control the new distribution platform and that unless the government intervenes the recording industry will disappear, and the music business will return to what it was in the nineteenth century, when publishing and performing were the main sources of revenue.
With which I'd agree entirely except that the turkey got his pessimists and optimists backwards!
Seabrook overlooked the "burn, baby, burn" perspective of the MP3 radicals and the kind of working musicians to whom a big-label recording contract is just sharecropping. That's particularly sad since the article is set in the context of the manufacture of another big-haired pop diva -- exactly the kind of music-in-the-back-seat-to-fashion dinosaur act that got the recording industry into its present fix.
(The title of the article, "The Money Note", is a bit of industry jargon for the sonic and emotional climax of a song, the "Iiiiiieeeeeeiiieeii will always love you" note as Seabrook describes it. He tells a story of its purported origin which sounds spurious to me -- producer David Foster saying to Barbara Streisand in a recording session, "That sounds like money" -- but misses the much more plausible connection to "the money shot" in porn. It's curious that the New Yorker's army of editors and fact checkers didn't correct him on this since the latter phrase was popularized by being similarly used as the title of a 1995 New Yorker article by Susan Faludi on the role of men in the porn industry.)