What lies ahead will be painful, without question, but that doesn’t mean that no good will come of the demise of the record industry. You know all those CDs that are largely being ignored on store shelves these days, while kids snap up Fallout 3? It’s costly waste. Think about the piles of plastic junk that will be lounging for lifetimes in landfills all around the country for a moment and then tell me it won’t be a net positive when CD manufacturing stops.

Most industries force consumers to adjust when a newer, cheaper method of delivering product is discovered. The music industry hasn’t. Instead of seeing an opportunity to shift consumption to a purely digital market once the iPod was released, the music industry continued to produce CDs, even though they are increasingly being ripped to hard drives and discarded anyway.

I saw how long and difficult it was to get consumers to move to DVD while I worked as a video store clerk. It’s tough transition, to be sure, but it did happen. The video industry weaned consumers off of VHS. The music industry has done the same frequently throughout its short history, moving consumers from one format to another, usually to protect its profit margin. Why doesn’t that still hold? They too are living in the past.

Is the music industry’s demise encoded in the CDs DNA? Chris Ott alluded to it in his 2005 Stylus feature, “This Click’s for You.” He might have called it “Death by 44.1kHz.” The changes fomented by the digital revolution were simply too great for the music industry to counter. They underestimated their consumers and now they’re paying a high price for it.

You’ll have to forgive me for seeing karmic retribution in what’s happening in the music business today, but it’s hard not too. Whether they’re ripping off artists or consumers, we’re talking about an industry that commodified art at a handsome profit for generations, only to beg for forgiveness on their deathbed.

Unfortunately for the music industry, the engine of innovation isn’t a spigot that can be turned off. The democratization of technology is a net good for society. More people are toying with ideas that make our lives more convenient through the sheer ease of digital files. It’s a phenomenon affecting many industries today. It will probably kill the newspaper as we know it. It just hit the music industry first.

Tennent’s plea asks us all to put our heads in the sand. No amount of cultural amnesia can fix this problem. Men in black can’t wipe our memories back to a time before Napster’s existence. But I know it’s not that simple-minded. This sentiment is common among critics, most of whom have no stake in the music business selling music. It’s a noble, but ultimately pointless exercise. I think our time as critics is better spent sifting through the ruins of the music industry to uncover the treasures they leave behind.

He writes:

And given that release dates still have an effect — their relationship to touring comes to mind — I don’t know that there’s an easy way to make this work. Also worrisome is the fact that it essentially hands over control of the process to participants in what could at best be called an ethically grey activity, which, while arguably pragmatic, doesn’t necessarily seem like something to be encouraged.

As far as I’m concerned, so-called pirates have hijacked the discourse surrounding the music industry for over ten years. This “ethically grey activity” threatens to sunder an industry that failed to accept technology into its business model, and a consumer base that doesn’t seem to care one way or the other what happens to it.

We’ve been mired in this ethical quandary for more than a decade, but moral victories are driving both the music industry and press to the poorhouse, and the music industry isn’t known for morals. Since my argument is for editorial to reclaim its relevance from the technologists who believed in better living through circuitry, I’m sure the industry wouldn’t mind if we reframed the conversation about their artists and releases, instead of focusing on the tragedy of yet another leak. Adhering to the old way of doing things may be more convenient, but everyone will have to relearn their jobs to face the new realities of the music industry.

But most importantly, I can’t state strongly enough how little release dates matter to the consumer. As I think back through time, I can think of exactly one Tuesday morning when I found myself waiting outside of a record store, and it was to buy a mediocre Pavement DVD. Tuesdays don’t generate the same excitement for the music business that Fridays do for Hollywood. The traffic simply isn’t there.

Music is shrinking from the public consciousness in both space and time. As record stores close and big box stores cut back on music inventory, music isn’t a tangible feature of consumer’s regular routine. Music is at once everywhere and nowhere. MTV and big publications like Rolling Stone and Spin once played a crucial role in promoting music, but either they changed, or their audiences did. Nothing has stepped up to replace them, certainly not on the scale of those once venerable institutions.

Music is in full retreat. Ask anyone who’s trying to drive traffic to music-specific websites. The metrics don’t lie. So how can we rally people to the cause? We need to make music relevant to consumers again. Only writers can breathe life back into it. We need a new mythology!

The alternative? Ruin. Fleeing into niche ghettos won’t work. Anyone who collected checks from Paper Thin Walls should know that. That’s not meant as a zing, but rather a commentary on how music performs at the margins. We need to bring the story to an audience in a way no one else can. The industry needs to allow us access to artists again, let us get close enough to tell these stories, help us build a bridge between the artist and audience over the fragmentation that characterizes media consumption.

The music press reads like a stream-of-consciousness novel with no punctuation. Coverage has been democratized to a fault. A critic’s value is in his or her ability to separate the wheat from chaff. We’re failing in that regard. It’s time to step up and reframe music in a way that helps consumers make decisions about what’s worthwhile, without resorting to rockism. It can be done. We can reduce the noise!

Don’t despair: tomorrow I’ll share a dirty little secret about how to program a music website that works.

I guess that it, too, is part of a “kind of obsolete vernacular,” as if to say, not quite yet. But when the new Yeah Yeah Yeah’s album, It’s Blitz, leaked earlier this week, I couldn’t help but smile. Here’s an album that won’t street until April, yet it’s everywhere you turn around online. This wasn’t like the U2 leak, where the labels did due diligence for a while until they realized the game of whack-a-mole was going to kill them. This leaked everywhere!

Blogs like Stereogum jumped right on the case. See, editorial has adapted. They’ve had no choice. Part of what I learned as a freelancer was that it wasn’t good enough to wait around to request an album to pitch it. Leak blogs were simply too fast. If you’re not on top of them, you’re left out in the cold. We had to change the way we did things to meet the changing habits of the most intense music consumers. The problem is that the industry hasn’t caught up yet.

If everyone agrees that leaks are inevitable, then why is anyone pretending they’re not. Even Pitchfork holds fast to release dates, which just seems absurd. We have to change the rules that print media set for us!

The real difficulty in reacting when an album leaks is the continued reliance on CD sales. If it weren’t for CDs, online outlets could flip a switch and make mp3s available. That would be easy, right? It would, but it would offend brick and mortar shops, which are still the industry’s bread and butter, immensely. That would be a bad thing. The last thing labels want to do is give retailers, especially big box stores, any excuse to pare back their music inventory further.

But something has to change, and overnighting shipments of product to those big box stores isn’t going to fix the problem.

So what’s the best solution? I think it’s a matter of reaching out to online outlets the moment an album leaks. Just pick a few to start and set up interviews, performances, whatever you can do to get out in front of the publicity again. Give yourself a chance to salvage some brand awareness. If you don’t, editorial will have a field day with your release and all your planning will be for naught. It’s hard enough in this business as it is. Why make it harder?