I think it's one of those things where the lesson learned isn't the customer's POV -- it's something along the lines of, "Now musicians can sell directly to the customer, and we're not getting a cut of that." Probably with a side dose of, "But that's not FA-A-I-R, that they can buy digital music and have it on every computer or player they own and burn it to disk and share it with their friends and we can't charge them separately for all of those things!" Again, thinking that if they can roll back the clock and make digital music not exist (or at least not be so widely shared) that their profits will go back up because they want to assume that every download is a lost purchase. ETA: The comparison that keeps getting made is to the producers of TV and movies freaking out over VCRs because they thought people would just tape everything off the TV and not pay to see movies, and they didn't predict the rise of home video sales and DVDs. And that business with the writers' strike where the production companies were trying to keep from having to share the profits on DVDs and downloads. Slow to adapt to the new models of distribution and trying to keep as much of the money for themselves as they can. I made a comment in Friday's post about how I'm actually not surprised that it takes a sci-fi label like Baen Books to really figure out the benefits of e-books and be making such a point of doing things like offering up free titles to hook new readers and selling e-books for cheaper than paperback prices and not selling some of these titles as e-books on Amazon even though they're offered up in Kindle format as well as several others -- which is to say, they're used to thinking about the future and they're on top of the curve here.