There are FAR more artists making little to no revenue from their artistic endeavors than your realize. Part of being an artist is the pleasure from creating the art in the first place, be it writing, painting, composing, et al.

Actually, you're partially wrong Cubby. People indeed are paying to see musical tribute acts (facsimile performances) of everyone from Frank Sinatra to Led Zeppelin. There's a very successful tribute band called ClassicRockBands that people are paying big bucks to see.

And this is suprising because? When the main source of "young people's" music comes from ear-buds and the like, what else would you expect? These kids are clueless as to what comprises a serious audio system. It's all about portability and accessibilty, and the rest be damned.

How sad that the ability to remove an application from Windows is generating worldwide news.

As someone that works and lives in Colorado, I find this truly embarassing.

Maybe an obvious question, but why wasn't the file (folder) at least encrypted?

As a drummer who's spent a fair amount of time in recording studios, I can tell you that the use of a click track is not always a black and white issue. More often than not, the producer will request a click because the other musicians (guitarists typically) can't find where "1" is. So you end up rehearsing a few times with the click before recording the actual track. And sometimes, the producer demands the use of the click because of the genre of music being recorded (country, r&b for example) so as a session musician you don't have much choice in the matter. And just as often, a good drummer can play along with a click and still allow the music to breath by "rushing and dragging" just enough to give the track some life, and the other musicians are none the wiser because they usually lock in with the drummer anyway. Click tracks have been around forever and are not that big of a deal. However, what's ruining real musicianship in the studios today is the use of ProTools to edit/fix mistakes being made while recording. Musicians now realize that if they don't nail the take perfectly, the engineer will fix the track with ProTools and we don't have to spend all day in the studio. What a crock of shit. The engineering firm that remastered the Beatles Let It Be Naked used ProTools to "fix the mistakes" made by John Lennon and Paul McCartney because they didn't intend to hit the wrong notes. These guys had no more right to fix the recordings any more than someone would be allowed to "fix" the Mona Lisa.