For the first forty years or so of recorded music, the only person who was likely to make any money was the owner of the record label. As copyright laws matured, songwriters began to score some cash. But unscrupulous publishers often convinced naive songwriters to sign away their rights. So once again, record money found its way into just a few hands.

The long-playing record, which was invented by Columbia Records and introduced in 1948, remained mostly a curiosity for more than ten years. Broadway shows and comedy were released on LP, but most rock and roll was released on seven-inch singles. "Albums" existed mostly as afterthoughts. The kids went out and bought those singles by the millions, but royalties on singles were almost non-existent and most performers saw little money.

And then the Beatles came, revolutionizing the "rock music industry" in two ways. First, their massive popularity made their long-players huge sellers, ushering in the era of the album. More importantly, perhaps, their profits as songwriters convinced many other rock and roll acts to start writing their own material. For example, the source of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards's first U.S. paycheck was "That Girl Belongs to Yesterday," a minor hit for Gene Pitney in 1964.

But it took the Beatles a couple albums to start writing all their own material. This isn't that surprising. The band released 14 albums (I'm using the standard British-version count) in eight years. When you figure that Guns N' Roses went 17 years between releases, 14 albums in eight years remains an impressive accomplishment.

Everyone in the 1960s was releasing scads of albums, though. The Stones, the Who, the Byrds, the Beach Boys, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Creedence Clearwater Revival--all of these bands released at least one album a year during their creative peaks. There were fewer tours--the Beatles famously quit playing live in 1966--but that was largely because the bands could actually make a living by recording music.

The one-album-a-year benchmark stuck through most of the 1970s, though massive bands like Led Zeppelin and the Who did slow up their output. This was not an entirely bad thing. As anyone who has sat through all three LPs of Sandinista will tell you, many bands (like the Clash) should have slowed up, or at least edited, their output.

By the 1980s, most superstar acts were releasing fewer albums. Major record labels had less product in the stores, which opened up space for the 80s indie rock revolution. A myriad of tiny record labels flooded stores--often only regionally, much like early rock and roll--with low-budget D.I.Y. efforts. Some of these bands proved worthwhile (Dead Kennedys, the Mekons, Bad Religion, the Flaming Lips and the Meat Puppets, among quite a few others) and many did not. Such is the nature of the marketplace.

That first indie rock insurgence signaled the death the music industry. Fewer superstar releases meant less sure-thing money for the big labels. In addition, the longer superstars went between releases, the less likely the next release would sell well. Ask Axl Rose about that one.

Ironically, the introduction of the CD staved off failure for more than a decade. Lots of folks bought old albums on CD, which was essentially free money for the record labels. After a while, though, most folks had done all their replacing and weren't buying so many old CDs. More importantly, the digital recording and encoding processes used on CDs had found a new home: the computer.

So if you want an old Rolling Stones album, you can buy an old LP at one of the few used record stores around the country. You can buy the same album on CD. You can buy the album on iTunes. Or you can go to the library, check out the CD and rip it into your computer.

Guess what most folks are doing.

Back in the day, tours promoted album sales. Record labels would subsidize touring costs and tickets to shows were artificially low. The labels wanted people to see the bands and then go out and buy the LPs or CDs.

The situation is reversed now. If a band happens to have a record label (which is increasingly unlikely), that label isn't committing one cent to a tour. Rather, the album release is what helps to promote the tour, which is where the band makes its money. This is one reason why ticket prices seem positively insane. Yes, promoters are greedy bastards, but the artists are demanding much higher fees because they now rely on road income for their livelihoods.

This isn't an entirely new phenomenon. Bands like the Jayhawks, who recorded a number of critically-acclaimed albums in the 1980s and 1990s, never sold more than 250,000 copies of any single release. For almost 20 years, the band toured incessantly. It didn't have a choice. The road was its only source of income. This is a hard life, and once the band members approached 50 years of age, they quit.

Despite all the doom and gloom about the death of the music industry, the truth is that there is just as much new music floating around out there today as there has ever been. It's just not recorded nearly so much. And it doesn't sell nearly as much, either. The music industry is becoming increasingly irrelevant, but music is just as important as ever.

Music has been around much longer than money (or any form of economic exchange, for that matter). Music will endure. And eventually, artists will find more ways to make a living doing what they love. Which will be good for all of us.

Jon Worley didn't intend for this column to be an allegory of the situation faced by the newspaper industry, but on second thought...