The music biz is alive and well

I love the modern music industry. I paid nothing for Radiohead’s In Rainbows. Good thing it sucked, because I would have felt pretty ripped off if I’d spent more than a cent. And I just finished downloading the entire Britney Spears catalog—even her bootlegged Euro dance remixes—from my favorite torrent. Not to mention the hours upon hours of porn on my hard drive. (I’m sure it’s not the first time a guy named Mac has suffered from sexually transmitted viruses.)

Eh, who knows, but this press release right here is telling me to attend the Grammy U: State of the Industry Music Panel, so I guess that’s what it’ll be about.

If you ask me, the industry is doing just fine. I mean, Jack Johnson is still singing that song, Keith Richards is still hanging on to life, Bono is doing a good job as the pope and Tupac is still dead. Plus, all the music’s free nowadays. So what’s there to complain about?

Well, supposedly there are going to be some industry heavy hitters talking dirty about the music biz at this seminar. People like Grammy-winning producer Narada Michael Walden (Mariah Carey, Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston) and Grammy-winning engineer Leslie Ann Jones will be on hand to give us the lowdown on the the current status of the music industry. They’ll even field questions, like, “I heard about this thing called the CD … can you expand on that?”