At a certain point, these stories become redundant; how many times do people have to demonstrate that file-trading doesn’t put musicians out of work? Today, Wilco (thanks, Margaret) and the somewhat less-well-known Brobdingnagian Bards (thanks, Jenny) testify that mp3s do not kill the market for packaged recordings of music.
I have yet to see reason to think that the Industries are not nearly so afraid of losing money to digital media as they are utterly terrified of changing their business models. Napster or no, they’ll make their thirty pieces of silver, and pass along the pence to the musicians. If they have to change business as usual, though, they may have to come up with something other than the present thinly-disguised payola system, and devising something new involves a risk of failure (for which even a music industry executive might be held responsible).