You're going to be taxed for music and love it!

Long before Napster existed, the music industry condemned itself to a broken sales model. It guaranteed piracy, huge online song swaps and declining revenue. Luckily, none of this has much to do with the health of music. Music is thriving like never before. It's the moguls and not the musicians who are hurting.

The record labels have gotten off pretty light in the P2P debate by making curious children seem like immoral thugs destined for a life of crime. Downloading that U2 song is the first step toward shoplifting and eventually clubbing grandmothers. It's easy to forget the CD price-fixing, scandalous use of sex, drugs and violence as promotional tools and total disregard for the technology landscape as drivers of the record labels' own failure.

Today, the artist gets 8 percent of the average CD sale with the label taking 49 percent, the retailer taking 30 percent, manufacturing taking 8 percent and shipping taking 5 percent.

Instead of looking at P2P users as dissatisfied, disgruntled customers and trying to make life better for them, the record labels saw criminals harming their bottom line. They chose to sue their customers and to lock down already digitized and wild music. The Future of Music explains why this was the worst of all possible reactions and why the record labels simply can't win this fight.