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Competition has always been a problem. But the answer to that problem was people buying records of music that they liked. No videos.

Stop fooling yourselves. Piracy did seriously wound the music industry. CD-R drives in computers and the internet, filesharing on Usenet, Napster, Googling for mp3s. Then record companies were getting less because they were selling singles vs. albums (though they sold 35s decades before with no problems, but albums/full CDs brought in more than the singles, at least when there was only one really popular single on an album/CD).

The industry is not coming back either. The record companies have little incentive to put money into a loser, which means everything is candy, peanut butter, and honey. No gourmet. Dave Brubeck would be a homeless man in today's record industry.

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Stop fooling yourselves. Piracy did seriously wound the music industry.

I'm not saying that it didn't. But you also have to recognize that the music industry betted against the Internet.

It took 10 years before I could easily pay for Internet delivered music. I'm not even saying that this is better than CDs, but they should at least have explored the possibilities. They deserved to go bust for all the mistakes they made the last 15-20 years.

"Piracy did seriously wound the music industry. ... The industry is not coming back either."

This is a very common fallacy. You're mis-identifying "the music industry" with one sector of the music industry. The sector that is injured by piracy is a set of companies that rely on buying up copyrights from artists and selling (or only "licensing") copies of recordings for money (most of which never goes near the creators).

The music industry as a whole is healthy - precisely because the fading of the copyright-exploitatation industry has allowed music to be re-democratized. Musical instrument manufacturing and sales, equipment for recording music or amplifying shows, wide distribution of recordings, and associated activities are doing just fine (allowing for the state of the economy overall).

Edit: The decline of the copyright-exploitatation industry may even be a net social benefit overall, if it reduces political rent-seeking behavior [1] like copyright extensions and DRM, which keep the one sector's profits artificially high at the expense of everyone else.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

In today's record industry, Dave Brubeck would not be homeless, he'd be one of the many thousands of extremely talented people recording stuff you've never heard because there's so much competition; but he'd find some audience and go around performing and making do. He'd probably struggle financially like lots of others and rightfully complain about gross economic inequities today in our corrupt system. None of this has anything to do with the red herring about "piracy".

> In today's record industry, Dave Brubeck would not be homeless ...

I have to repeat something funny that Brubeck said -- he said the most common question asked by fans was, "How many musicians are there in your quartet?"

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