[Mazer]

Well the difference between Microsoft and the music industry is that Microsoft is one single corporation and the music industry is five different companies. The federal trade commision can penalize those five companies (in a very limited way) for price fixing but since they are separate corporations antitrust laws do not apply to them, no matter how much they operate like a monopoly. (Even if they were one company they would be broken up and we'd be left with the same situation.) What needs to happen is each marketing department, shipping department, production department, recruiting department, and recording department from each company needs to be merged into separate corporations, that way no one company could recruit, record, manufacture, market, and distribute music by itself. When a monopoly is broken up it is usually reorganized in this way, but the law doesn't make any provisions for multi-monopolies like the the music industry. Basically the music business should look and act more like professional sports, with draft picks, franchises, even team competetion. Musicians should be rated not on the number of records they sell but on the number of seats they fill. The RIAA and MPAA could take lessons from the NFL and the NBA.