The big music conglomerates haven't been doing so well lately. Despite the fact that there are more teenagers on the earth today than at any time in the history of the earth, CD sales are declining. The executives of these companies, in their wisdom, decided that digital downloads of songs were the cause of this malaise, and so they cranked up a massive legal campaign that seems to have netted mostly 12-year-olds and grandmas.

But the recent woes of the recording industry have very little to do with file-sharing--illegal or not. Kids aren't buying CDs because they're buying DVDs and video games. CDs have slipped because it's very difficult for a kid today to hear much in the way of new music anywhere other than the Internet.

Now, I grant you, the mega-stars have indeed been hurt by file-sharing. They're probably losing a tenth to a quarter of their possible sales--a million or two CDs, easy. A million in lost sales is a lot, but not enough of a hit to, say, force Eminem to petition for a public defender at his next trial.

More than anything else, the big labels are hurting in the mid-range categories, albums that sell between 100,000 and 500,000 a clip. It's true that major labels throw out all sorts of crappy albums and hope that one in ten goes platinum. But they also need for three or four of those other albums to sell 250,000 or so. Not only do those moderate-sales albums pull their own weight, artists that sell that well are often just an album or two away from selling a lot.

But major labels have shed non-platinum artists like dandruff in the past few years, which would make it very easy for me to say one of the big reasons for big music's big malaise is dramatically shortened rosters, but that's not really true. I could say that major labels release a lot of crap, which is certainly true, but an even greater truth is that people buy a lot of crap. I mean, does anyone actually believe that Britney Spears can actually sing? Come on. There are good artists releasing good albums on major labels. And some even sell well. But not enough albums are selling well enough. Do you know why? Because there's no way to hear new music any more.

When I was a kid, you could turn on a radio station and hear a Dolly Parton song followed by a Human League song followed by a Cameo song followed by an Aldo Nova song--you get the picture. This was called "Top 40," the forty most popular songs in the country, regardless of perceived genre. Sure, most radio stations didn't play all of the music in the top 40, but most played most (if you get my drift). They had to if those songs were to remain popular. And while a popular single didn't necessarily mean a big hit album, it never hurt to be alive and well on the singles chart.

But even while I was in high school, pop radio was splintering into mutually-exclusive subgroups (rock 40, rap 40, etc). No one paid much attention at the time, though, because there was one national top 40 station: MTV. MTV played all the hits all the time, and every once in a while it helped to break a new artist.

Then MTV stopped the music. A friend of mine made some good money penning the joke "I watched some classic MTV today...they played a video." He wrote that back in 1992. No one at the top noticed this, though, because top 40 stations were switching to "young country" in droves. Profits kept rolling in even as non-country music sales plummeted.

And while the likes of the Backstreet Boys and Britney (and, more importantly, Eminem and Nelly) helped bring more balance to the picture at the end of the decade, these are not the sorts of artists with real staying power. There's not a Beatles or even Lionel Richie in the bunch. Questions of quality and the ephemeral nature of pop fame aside, there are fewer and fewer places to get exposure for an unknown artist. In the olden days, you could tell you'd changed cities because the pop radio was subtly different--a greater reliance on Joan Jett rather than Rick Springfield, say. There's not even that much variety any more. Most of the radio stations in this country are controlled by two companies--companies that have a big say in what gets played on their stations. If you don't pass muster with ClearChannel, life gets difficult.

The best hope for the major labels was to use Internet file sharing as a sort of experiment in free-form radio. But they got skittish and sued instead. They're all morons. They certainly didn't look at the big picture before they called up the lawyers.

Oh well. The funny thing in all this is that independent labels are going great guns after taking a pretty good hit in the late 90s. There's a lot more good music out there than ever before, and thanks to Amazon just about anyone can buy just about any album. And if the album is self-released, CDBaby.com is there to fill that gap. More and more great albums of the past are being re-issued by small entrepreneurs whose sales outlets are almost entirely Internet-only. The future looks pretty bright for the "little music" people.

Even with all my naysaying, though, I'm not one of those who think that the major music labels are doomed. They may succeed in breaking fewer and fewer new artists, but major labels own too much music to simply go away. Like it or not, every year there will be a "new" Beatles album, and every year a few million people will buy it. That's enough to keep fueling the fires of the music industry for years to come.

Jon Worley can't remember the last time he bought a major-label album.