Lately, I’ve found myself afflicted by something I like to call Playlist Ennui. A lot of the time, when I pop on my iPod to listen to some tunes, I end up clicking through hundreds of songs at a time because I’m just so sick of the same old thing. Even the fact that I’ve accumulated over 2,000 mp3s doesn’t save me from the dreaded Playlist Ennui, because I’ve had most of them for years, and that’s plenty of time to make it through a few thousand songs a few hundred times. The problem with finding new music nowadays is that there is way too much out there. It’s not as simple as just tuning into the radio; there’s MySpace and Last.fm and hundreds of other websites that can throw handfuls of recommendations at you without batting an eye. It’s overwhelming. Take a deep breath. I can help.

While you’re checking out your new tunes, take a moment to consider how much the music industry has changed in the past few years. It’s not just anecdotal: last year, Lil Wayne’s Grammy-winning album “Tha Carter III” sold 2.88 million copies, more than any other album of 2008. And for the first time since the inception of the current sales-tracking system in 1991, the number one best-selling album of the year didn’t even crack 3 million sales.

Back in 1991, Vanilla Ice’s mainstream debut “To The Extreme” sold seven million copies. And it wasn’t even the top seller. Nirvana’s “Nevermind” was - selling a now-astounding ten million copies.

Music piracy is an easy scapegoat for falling album sales, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. iTunes sales are through the roof, becoming a legitimate form of tracking music popularity in their own right. More and more artists are making their material available online for free. These things aren’t a result of piracy, they’re an inevitable development of the internet age. It shouldn’t come as any surprise that the first music transfers on the internet were illicit; that’s always the way things go.

At first, online music vendors (and, worse, some record labels) tried embedding DRM in their products to help curtail piracy, but consumers weren’t pleased. Even iTunes, famous for its password-protected mp4s, is now making its library available in the standard mp3 format. Lev Grossman, in a 2007 Time Magazine article, wrote:

Most people don’t even notice DRM–who puts their music on five different computers anyway?–but there’s something annoyingly unfair about FairPlay even in the abstract. You paid for the music. Who is Apple to tell you where you can and can’t stick it?

As with most cases of Consumer vs. The Man, it was a matter of principle.

Another, more terrifying milestone in the digital music timeline was the lawsuits. We all remember seeing news reports of minors, college kids, and other easy targets being sued by the RIAA. It was tough to pick sides: while they were clearly in breach of copyright law, morally, music piracy doesn’t register very high on the crime scale. It reeked of the same injustice we feel for being pulled over at a speed trap while other cars whiz by: sure, okay, I screwed up, but so did everyone else. Why me? Why do I have to pay for the sins of my generation?

The RIAA wasn’t stupid. They knew there was no squeezing blood from a turnip, and they weren’t trying to recoup their losses from falling sales. They just wanted to make an example of people. They hoped that the fear of retribution, however remote, would put a dent in the piracy that was bleeding them dry. (It didn’t work, of course. People still speed in school zones, and they still want to save fifteen bucks by downloading Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends from a torrent site.)

At various times, different artists have spoken out against piracy. When her album “American Life” hit the file-sharing networks in 2003, Madonna responded by flooding them with spoofed recordings that featured her yelling “What the f*** are you doing?” in lieu of the songs. And Metallica famously spoke out against piracy, even filing a lawsuit against Napster. Recently they’ve lost some of their anti-piracy edge, but they still issue takedown notices.

But these sorts of admonitions always ring hollow - none of these artists are hurting for cash, and it’s hard to make the case that they truly deserve millions of dollars for the amount of work that they do. And smaller artists make pennies on the dollar for album sales anyway; as always, most artists make money off of live shows. Even when album sales were through the roof, they were a tiny percentage of the average band’s profits.

Still, album sales do count for something. The difference in sales between “Nevermind” and “Tha Carter III” shows a 70% decrease in sales over the last 17 years - but before you start shedding too many tears for the artists and record company executives who surely cannot afford to eat, let’s take singles into account. The sales of mp3s on online merchants like iTunes have taken a chunk out of album sales, but they actually turn a bigger profit margin for record companies: there are no CDs to burn, no liner notes to print, and no cases to manufacture. Digital sales can only help.

Last year, iTunes became America’s No. 1 Music Store. No, I didn’t accidentally leave “digital” out of that sentence. Their sales surpassed those of brick-and-mortar stores, beating out even Wal-Mart in their music sales. Which is impressive: a digital CD download generally costs at least $3-5 less than a physical disc. While Apple doesn’t disclose iTunes’ profits separately from the rest of its business, their 2008 numbers showed a 27% profit jump from the year before, and that’s not just from MacBooks.

Even in this unsteady financial market, there is still money to be made in the music industry. While songs are still a luxury purchase, 99 cents is still an affordable splurge for most people - album sales might fall off even further, but online profits are here to stay. It’s impossible to predict the future, but chances are, today’s MySpace music stars will be the Lil Waynes and Lily Allens of tomorrow. After all, that’s where they started out.

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