I think that you are missing something very critical: technology given us new tools the past twenty years which make previous ones more obsolete. Its the idea o

I think that you are missing something very critical: technology given us new tools the past twenty years which make previous ones more obsolete. Its the idea of creative destruction. When the car was invented, the horse-buggy industry died. In our case, the horse-buggy is the music cd industry. Instead of the industry trying to find a new business model with the emerging technology, they are trying to force us to stay with the old model. Fortunately, other companies have innovated in place of the RIAA (and MPAA) and we have services like Spotify, Pandora, and Netflix. Do not confuse these companies with the industry itself. Especially with the music companies (Spotify and Pandora) the companies are paying ridiculous royalties on the music they play (especially when compared with an actual radio station). I can tell you that Pandora does not use DRM for the music that they play for you (about a year or two ago I sniffed the traffic and found raw mp3s being transferred, they might have changed that but I hope not). Still, I did not see people simply downloading all of Pandoras music. If people wanted to do that, there are much better ways (a la bittorrent). Therefore, the real issue here is control. The industry wants to control what you can and cannot do; even more so than they used to be able to. For example, adding music to a home video which you post on youtube is something they dont want you to be able to do. You have the legal right to do so, but they still dont want you to. (You have the legal right to do so, so long as it is a creative use not meant for monitization, etc.) As long as the DRM provider allows you to do what you want to do, it can be seamless. But as soon as you want to step outside those bounds (whether within your legal right or not) theres going to be friction. I bet that people who like making videos with popular songs playing in the background have more of a problem with spotify than people who simply like listening to radio.