Music Industry: Technology is your friend, embrace it!

Here are some other possible reasons I can think of to account for the music industry's decline:

1. Competition with other forms of entertainment

2. Poor quality product

3. Insistence on sticking to an out-of-date CD format when people are listening to music differently and just want to get per-song downloads

4. High prices and making consumers buy an entire album when only one song is good

5. Suing their own customers instead of winning them over

6. Making legit customers pissed off with pain-in-the-ass Copy-Control CDs that cannot work in all audio devices and cannot be easily ripped into mp3 players like the iPod.

7. No viable alternative for users who want paid downloads (until iTunes came along)

8. Sales have not declined, shipments have, because retailers are now ordering what they think they need, and not eating the overrun

9. Britney Spears