iTunes is 5 years old this week. The seb internet turned 15 yesterday. The decade delta between those dates is the generous amount of time the music industry had to save itself from the fate that overcame it … and didn’t. In these five years, iTunes has sold more than 4 billion songs. Think of how many songs the music industry could have sold us if only they’d gone with the flow of new opportunities and given us the chance instead of persecuting us and resisting reality while trying to preserve outdated business models based on outmoded technology. Every industry knows how the music guys blew it; it is now an article of faith in any conversation about the internet and innovation. The presumption is that they didn’t act fast enough, that the internet came barreling down on them. No, in retrospect, they had plenty of time to learn and experiment and find new opportunities to get music to us in new ways. A decade. They’re worse idiots than I thought.
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