......There'll still be some big hits (Celine Dion is Stephen King), but even if you're fairly high up on the music-business ladder, most of your time, which you'd previously spent with megastars, will be spent with mid-list stuff. Where before you'd be happy only at gold and platinum levels, soon you'll be grateful if you have a release that sells 30,000 or 40,000 units - that will be your bread and butter. You'll sweat every sale and dollar. Other aspects of the business will also contract - most of the perks and largesse and extravagance will dry up completely. The glamour, the influence, the youth, the hipness, the hookers, the drugs - gone. Instead it will be a low-margin, consolidated, quaintly anachronistic business, catering to an aging clientele, without much impact on an otherwise thriving culture awash in music that only incidentally will come from the music industry.

This glum (if also quite funny) fate is surely the result of compounded management errors - know-nothingness as well as foolishness and acting-out (suing college kids). But it's way larger too. Management solutions in the music business have, rightly, given way to a pure, no-exit kind of fatalism.

It's all pain. It's all breakdown. Music-business people, heretofore among the most self-satisfied and self-absorbed people of the age are suddenly interesting, informed, even ennobled, as they become fully engaged in the subject of their own demise. Producers, musicians, marketing people, agents...they'll tlak you through what's happened to their business - it's part B-school case study and part Pilgrim's Progress.

Radio and rock and roll have had the most remarkable symbiotic relationship in media - the synergy that everybody has tried to re-create in media conglomerates. Radio got free content; music labels got free promotion.

Radio's almost effortless cash flow and mon-and-pop organization, made it ripe for consolidation, which began in the mid-eighties and was mostly completed as soon as Congress removed virtually all ownership limits in 1996. A handful of companies now control nearly the entirety of U.S. radio, with Clear Channel and its more than 1,200 stations being the undisputed Death star.

Radio, heretofore ad hoc and eccentric and local, underwent a transformation in which it became formatted, rational and centralized. Its single imperative was to keep people from moving the dial - seamlessness became the science of radio.

The music business suddenly had to start producing music according to very stringent (if unwritten) commercial guidelines. Format became law. Everything had to sound the way it was supposed to sound. Fungibility was king. Familiarity was the greatest virtue.

Once Sheryl Crow was an established hit, the music business was compelled to offer up and endless number of Sheryl Crow imitators. Then when the Sheryl Crow imitators became a reliable radio genre, Sheryl Crow was compelled to imitate them. But then, just as radio playlists become closely regulated, the Internet appears. File sharing replaced radio as the engine of music culture.

It wasn't just that it was free music - radio offered free music. But whatever you wanted was free, whenever you wanted it. The Internet is music consumerism run amok, resulting not only in billions of dollars of lost sales but in an endless bifurcation of taste. The universe fragmented into subuniverses, and then sub-subiniverses. The music industry, which depends on large numbers of people with similar interests for its profit margins, now had to deal with an ever-growing number of fans with increasingly diverse and eccentric interests.

It is hard to think of a more profound business crisis. You've lost control of the means of distribution, promotion, and manufacturing. You've lost quality control - in some sense, there's been a quality-control coup. You've lost your basic business model - what you sell has become as free as oxygen.

For a long while, the management response at the major labels had a weird combination of denial and foot stomping: putting Napster out of business - then sort-of/sort-of-not buying Napster - all the while being told by everybody who know anything about technology that no matter what the music industry does or who it sues, music will be, inevitably, free. Duh. There is, too, a management critique - perhaps most succintly put by Don Henley in his now infamous post-Grammy letter wherein he quoted Mel Brooks Blazing Saddles: "Gentlemen, gentlemen! We've got to protect our phoney baloney jobs!" - that sees record labels as generally engaged in the uusual practive of ripping off anyone who can be ripped off while remaining oblivious to the fact that Rome is burning.

It's a spreadsheet solution. There will continue to be a market for selling music; however diminished - but it will have to be cheaper music. Margins will shrink even more. Accordingly, costs will have to shrink. Spending a few million to launch an act will shortly be a thing of the past.

And then there is the CD theory. This theory is widely accepted - with great pride, in fact - in the music industry. It represents the ultimate music-biz hustle. But its implications are seldom played out.

The CD theory holds that the music business actually died about twenty years ago. It was revived without anyone knowing it had actually died because compact-disc technology came along and everybody had to replace what they'd bought for the twenty years prior to the advent of the CD.

The music business, this theory acknowledges, is about selling technology as much as music. From Mono to Stereo to Walkman. It just happens that the next stage of technological development in the music business has largely excluded the music business itself.

The further implication, though, might be the more interesting and painful one: You can't depend on just the music.

Howard Stringer, interviewed by Heilemann during lunch on the subject of file sharing and the future of the music business, was a world-weary presence. He had come out of the news business and risen through the ranks of network television and found himself on top of an anomalous media empire as chairman of Sony America. Sony had been slated to take over the media world a generation or so ago, but had faltered when it realized it had paid too dearly for what it had bought, and then when the Japanese economy fell apart, and finally when it learned that all of this hardware-software-cross-platform synergy was, relatively speaking, bunk.