- Many of Glover’s best customers worked at the plant, and for those he trusted most he devised an even better deal. Rather than paying five dollars per movie, for twenty dollars a month you could buy an unlimited subscription—and you didn’t even need the disks. Glover had set up his own topsite, and once you’d bought an account you could download anything you wanted. There were current DVDs, plus the latest copies of games, music, software, and more. At the time, video on demand was the technology of the future, but, if you knew Glover, it had already arrived. He was running a private Netflix out of his house.
That was a rollicking good read, but the title's misleading. How did he break the music industry? He didn't. The only main point made about sales were that ripping and releasing early on the internet correlated with increased sales.
I'm not going to claim that he single-handedly tore down the industry, but let's be intellectually honest here. If this article is to be trusted, the revenue of music sales has fallen by more than 50% since their high point in the 90s. You can claim that the labels had a stranglehold on the market and were overvalued at the time, but that doesn't change the fact that piracy has completely changed the face of the music industry. The music industry may not be broken, but the industry of the 90s most certainly is.
I could just as easily blame DRM for this though. Also, as far as I'm concerned, the RIAA can go fuck themselves. Also, I wouldn't really trust a consulting firm to provide reliable data. In fact, study, after study has shown that piracy has had a positive effect on the music industry. That's why there are many artists that are okay with it (note: the source of the last article is obviously not neutral on this issue, but I included it because it has good citations).