[W]e have a business that's dying. There won't be any major labels pretty soon. [They'll surely not be missed!]

In 2000, U.S. consumers bought 785.1 million albums; last year, they bought 588.2 million [A 25% decline.]

In 2000, the ten top-selling albums in the U.S. sold a combined 60 million copies; in 2006, the top ten sold just 25 million [Ouch!]

More than 5,000 record-company employees have been laid off since 2000. [That /does/ suck.]

About 2,700 record stores have closed across the country since 2003, [Including all the local stores around here.]

Around sixty-five percent of all music sales now take place in big-box stores such as Wal-Mart and Best Buy, which carry fewer titles than specialty stores and put less effort behind promoting new artists. [Rough on the artists, that.]

The Internet appears to be the most consequential technological shift for the business of selling music since the 1920s, when phonograph records replaced sheet music as the industry's profit center. [No! Really?]

[M]any in the industry see the last seven years as a series of botched opportunities. And among the biggest, they say, was the labels' failure to address online piracy at the beginning by making peace with the first file-sharing service, Napster. "They left billions and billions of dollars on the table by suing Napster — that was the moment that the labels killed themselves," [Not that we in the online world didn't realize it at the time...]

In the fall of 2003, the RIAA filed its first copyright-infringement lawsuits against file sharers. They've since sued more than 20,000 music fans. ... there was a 4.4 percent increase in the number of peer-to-peer users in 2006, with about a billion tracks downloaded illegally per month, [Guess that didn't work out too well, did it?]

"They will look much like conventional driver's licenses, but will be loaded with proof of citizenship and other information that can be easily scanned at the border."