From the article:
"This is the end of the music industry as we know it," said James McQuivey, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, in a statement. "Media executives eager to stay afloat in this receding tide must clear the path of discovery and purchase, but only hardware and software providers can ultimately make listening to music as easy as turning on the radio."
Not sure what that means exactly, but they also said TV would kill cinema, VCR's would kill TV, etc. Obviously TV & cinema still exist with VCR's (and DVD's and youtube etc.), but the business model has to adapt, and I think this change is more wrenching than most -- it's tough to compete with "free" (though note the article is about "download SALES" -- I bet with "illegal" downloading, CD's already account for a minority of the music being distributed.)
On the radio end, more and more labels are starting to make things available to stations via download instead of actually sending CD's in the mail. We're also already talking about eventually converting the CD library to an mp3 archive on a server (the main issue here is that they take up too much space! And another part of that is I think there's "too many" records being released these days -- the number of self-releases and microlabels has exploded in the past decade or so.)
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