Does the emergence of the digital download signal the end for the music industry?

As early as the 1970’s, the threat of piracy of copyrighted material occurred to the music industry with the invention of the cassette player. Today, the RIAA are concerned with ‘the culture of piracy’ through file sharing. Lessig suggests 4 types of file sharing, two of which have very interesting viewpoints. He suggests that file sharing is used ‘as a substitute for purchasing’, which is ‘clearly harmful’. The other is that file sharing is used to ‘sample music before purchasing’, which he explains is ‘illegal but plainly beneficial’. An example to prove this method of file sharing works in favour for the music industry is Radiohead’s ‘pay what you like’ experiment with their album ‘In Rainbows’. The experiment proved that fans were willing to pay the average price for the album and not just download songs for free because they could. 

Therefore, I don’t think the emergence of digital downloading will result in the end of the music industry. It could instead be beneficial for them.