While the music industry fiddles, its business is going up in flames. Given how much money is at stake--roughly $38 billion in CDs, records and cassettes each year--you'd think that someone would have reached for a hose sooner. But with the launch last week of RealNetworks' remarkably useful JukeBox--a free bit of software that makes it almost too easy to convert music CDs into pass-around computer files--my hunch is that it's already too late. I can smell the burning plastic discs from here.
The record companies have yet to agree on a standard for distributing music digitally online, but hope to...