Simple business 101: You don't piss off millions and millions of customers with blatant corporate greed. The Napster users' boycott is being felt. The last CD I bought had a survey asking what made me decide to buy this album. My answer was, I heard it on Napster and decided to get the album. They just killed the absolute best free advertising they could have hoped for.

-- Pete Kasten

The problems of the music industry don't take a rocket scientist to understand: A lousy product sold at a high price yields no sales. With a few exceptions, there is precious little musical originality or virtuosity coming from any of the current commercial acts, which rely on excess, hype and 13-year-olds to generate sales.

-- Doug Leins

There are a couple of issues here that your article fails to mention. How about the quality (or lack of it) of the music that's coming from the industry today? The current crop of "artists" won't be around 10 years from now, let alone a year from now, since their music doesn't sell except to a select audience.

Another issue that was not discussed in your article was scalpers. Take a look on eBay some time and see what performers' tickets are really going for! The Washington, D.C., area has an entire industry of folks who make their living scalping tickets. People are just not gonna pay to go to a concert when the asking price is roughly three or four times the face price of the ticket. I wanted to see Jimmy Buffett a couple of years ago for my birthday and we ended up paying $300 for two in-house seats whose face value was $45 per ticket. I guess it all depends on whether a person wants to see an artist badly enough and just what the market will bear. Most people would prefer to purchase the CD than dish out a couple of days' salary to see their music favorites play on stage.

-- Adrienne Alexander

Two related factors are probably contributing to the obvious and rapid decline in the music biz: industry concentration and foreign ownership. Labels are part of entertainment companies now, meaning the sort of artists they promote are not musicians or singers per se but telegenic dance puppets who look good but don't have to sound good (since the voice can be synthesized and sync'ed). They are looking for the next Britney or Christina; they don't care about the next Dave Matthews.

Also, several labels are now foreign-owned, meaning they know little or nothing about the U.S. musical tradition and care nothing about developing new artists. Bottom line: The industry's current masters are not in the business of making music, but making money. If performance, professionalism and creativity "need" to be sacrificed in order to integrate what remains of the U.S. musical tradition into the relentless commercial behemoth of mass-trash, profit-über-alles instant-gratification culture, why should they care?

The Germans at BMG might shrink from prostituting their own musical tradition before the shamelessly low taste of U.S. bottom-feeding consumers, but they probably have little regard for our tradition, so why waste a pfennig on maintaining its health and growth? Manipulating the public with cheap, mindless entertainment, though, brings diminishing returns over time.

I doubt the "music industry," separate from the entertainment industry, will survive for very long.

-- Lindsey Eck

I really appreciated your article on the current music biz downturn. I find it interesting that almost as fast as Napster disappeared as a popular force, the record industry sales began to suffer.

I could be wrong, of course, but it seems logical that in the face of tighter and tighter controls on how music gets exposed, with fewer opportunities for the public to hear new artists, it becomes much more difficult for the industry to respond to public dissatisfaction with the current crop of big names. Napster filled that gap, making available in an easily digestible and understandable form the ability to sample every new name that a listener might encounter.

The industry thought they were dealing with theft of the never-ending magic carpet ride of the current hits. Instead, they were putting out of business the best hope they had of exposing new artists to the ravenous public. Yeah, some of those people were abandoning buying CDs; these people are the ones moving on to the more complicated but still usable substitutes for Napster we've all heard about but can't remember. The rest of the public is just getting by without anything new in their lives, waiting to be dazzled, but thinking the current songs all stink.

-- Steve Pick