It’s an old joke, but it has some truth in today’s music industry. To many people, the music industry is “going to hell in a hand basket” — and fast! And the Internet and the “Digital Revolution” are to blame. Young people are staying home more, playing video games and watching a ton of channels on HD TV.

Now all this stuff is really not all that new. It’s called “narrowcasting.” TV stations, toy manufacturers and record companies have been doing it for years — target a specific audience or age range and put out whatever appeals to that group. These days, the big problem is that there a lot more industries targeting the same group of people (who would normally spend their money on music).

Instead, these new industries are enticing people with Playstations, iPhones, Blackberries, Wii games, laptops and online free music downloads. These new “digital industries” have money to spend, lots of it, to get people to buy into “the new digital revolution”!! Plus, soaring gas prices don’t help to make people wanna drive to see their favorite band. Unfortunately, the record industry doesn’t know how to react to this whole digital crisis. In the old days (pre-digital), things were pretty easy for record companies. The record companies financed the making and distribution of artists’ songs. Royalties were collected and paid out, and the groups did well off touring.

Copying records on tape was slow and labor intensive, so stealing wasn’t an issue. Radio and TV airplay were the only other places of concern, but licensing solved that problem quickly. Then cassettes came along, and things got sticky.

Make a copy to play in your car, and the courts said that’s ok. But make a copy for a friend, and you were in trouble. The record companies solution — add a tax on all blank cassettes sold, and the record companies got that as payment for lost revenues from copying the music. Besides, the cassettes weren’t all that high quality. It turned out that people would buy factory cassettes of popular music, so the record companies had a second source of income.

When CDs were first introduced, the record companies pounced on the idea — hard. It was perfect — replace those expensive-to-make vinyl disks with these new little cheap discs and keep the prices the same. Way more profit!! They already had the blank cassette market revenues, so everything was rosy. They quickly discontinued all of their vinyl record production in favor of this new CD format. In a very short period of time, DATs, home CD burners and home computers all hit the market — big time.

Suddenly, things weren’t so rosy for the record companies. People could make perfect copies of these CDs quickly and easily — and the sound quality was identical. They got taxes added to blank DAT tapes and blank music CDs, but the home computers and the Internet problems couldn’t be solved as easily. If someone puts a song on the Internet (for everyone to download for free), how does the record company get paid? Cool idea for people that aren’t signed, but potentially bad for big artists, and VERY bad for the record company.

That’s where we are today. Record companies trying to stop free downloads, other industries targeting the same group of people that normally buy records and gas prices soaring, making it too expensive to go out as much.

And that brings us to the perfect question for the new age: “Why am I in this hand basket, and where are we going?” (Harvey Gerst), ITR Studios, http://ITRstudio. com