The state of music file sharing/RIAA/etc. in 2010?

The very wise S**n C*rruth*rs (name protected from future R*AA autobots...biddy biddy biddy) noted recently on a different thread that while the recent ruling on Verizon being forced to provide private customer information to the RIAA for would-be digital pirates (appeal pending) is extremely frightening on first thought, this may eventually be a good thing in disguise. That is, once the music industry does get a decent grip on people downloading music and realize the lack of sales isn't necessarily tied to it, that many artists, by then, would have decided to opt out of RIAA membership, go for business with one less middleman, and work directly with their fans... leaving the RIAA even more obsolete and further behind.

Let's face it. The reality of what digital media really is -- a bunch of data fragmented into these things called files and headers and stuff that can easily be extracted on inexpensive media -- is very well known to the general public now. I give the masses more benefit of the doubt in not forgetting that in the next few decades. So any attempt to suppress downloading, whether it works or not, is really too late. Because everyone knows that there is some way to get at it easily. I'm not talking just redbook audio CDs here, but any future digital medium.

Anyway, getting back to the future of the RIAA and what not, what I think will come from this, for better or for worse, is that old dinosaur rock acts will lose relevance at an accelerated rate, as they are the ones who benefit and will continue to benefit from RIAA ties the most -- and if it is more expensive and difficult to dig in to their catalog than (what I hope will be) the new crop of artists that have learned to avoid the RIAA fork in the road, there will be far more frugal options available than now.

OK, there's a lot of ASS-U-ME-ing on my part here.. but hey, it's FUN!

Worst case scenario for would be file sharing swabs... in the future, you might need two machines in your household. A "main" machine (i.e. people who like what Windows has to offer, except for that Nagging Finger For File Sharing Chip in the motherboard), and a "naughty" machine (i.e. maybe Mac but more likely a cheap Linux box with only CD ripping software on it, or similar).