I beg to differ, Don.
The recorded music business (*) signed its own death warrant with the introduction of the CD.
Here are a couple of links that explain it well. There are plenty more.
Shiny Aluminium, Plastic And Digital (http://www.negativland.com/news/?page_id=24)
"Lancing the f***ing boil": how digital killed Big Music (http://arstechnica.com/media/reviews/2009/03/lancing-the-fing-boil-inside-the-major-labels-slump.ars)
Essentially, there has been an approximately 100 year long blip in the history of folk music which started with the ability to record sounds, making recorded music a marketable product that was quickly taken advantage of by big business. In economic terms it was a private good (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivalry_(economics)). Now that anyone with a computer on the internet has the means to exactly copy a CD and distribute it without cost recorded music is a [i]public good[/i] in every sense except the legal one. That it is otherwise is a fiction perpetuated by a dying industry, soon to go the way of the village blacksmith and the chimney cleaner, but without the dignity - watch how they clutch at straws like a drowning man, consorting with the worst sort of lawyer to blackmail their own customer base (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/06/straightforward-legal-blackmail-a-tale-of-p2p-lawyering.ars) while showing all the class of P.T. Barnum in perpetrating such lowest common denominator programming as The X Factor.
Music has not fared well in the hands of business men. Listen to any pop music radio station. Personally I will be delighted for folk music - because that is what it is, in a literal sense of the term - music made by the common folk - to be back in hands of the common folk and well away from people who care more about bank balances than any musical considerations.
Classical music will be as it has always been, not profitable but supported by the super-rich. Once it was the crowned heads of Europe who patronised it, latterly it has been subsidised by governments and commissioned by the movie industry and such like.
As for the quality of digital reproduction, this will only improve with time as bandwidth will only increase and memory will only become cheaper and soon enough the lossy compression of mp3 and suchlike will become a distant memory - an interim measure pending better times, and recording with sample rates and resolution far exceeding CD quality will become widely available as computer processing power increases exponentially, as it inevitably will (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law).
(PS Don't blame Steve Jobs for being a smarter operator than the cocaine addled dinosaurs of the record industry. There's not that much difference between a drowning man's head and a stepping stone in the business world. He's doing it to the phone companies too - I laughed like a drain when he described the new iPod Touch as "like an iPhone without the contract." You'll see what he meant when you get city-wide Wi-Fi.)
(*) The good news is that live music is on the rise. People are going to more performances and spending their money on ticket and merchandise.
