2007: The Year The Music Industry Broke?

It's been an interesting year for music biz: MTV just published the first installment of a  three-part series on the future of music, &  take a look back at 'what went wrong' and when in this article:  "Madonna Ditches Label, Radiohead Go Renegade: The Year The Music Industry Broke". MTV also posted this video & interviews with various industry notables:

The Future Of Music: What's Next? Experts weigh in on what the future holds, what makes a star and how the music industry changed this year. Are Things Really That Bad? Album sales might be down, but downloads, ringtones, ticket sales and other aspects of the industry are booming.

And WIRED magazine posted this  interview with Doug Morris, CEO of Universal: "Universal's CEO Once Called iPod Users Thieves. Now He's Giving Songs Away" with another terrific article from David Byrne, Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists — and Megastars (highly recommended - after all, as he says, 'what is music, anyway?': 

• In the past, music was something you heard and experienced — it was as much a social event as a purely musical one. Before recording technology existed, you could not separate music from its social context. Epic songs and ballads, troubadours, courtly entertainments, church music, shamanic chants, pub sing-alongs, ceremonial music, military music, dance music — it was pretty much all tied to specific social functions. It was communal and often utilitarian. 
  

Are we confusing 'recordings' with 'music'? Alternatively, what about the 'art' in 'virtual' record production themselves (eg, seminal works & 'paintings' like Sgt. Peppers,Dark Side of the Moon,etc). Jonathan Sterne's 'The Audible Past' (over at Sterneworks) is a great read - puts the very recent technological history of music into some perspective.