Brian,

My experience has taught me to pay attention to what I see and what I see is:

A terrestrial radio industry that would rather migrate to formats such as talk, news or sports than to pay a statutory rate of $5,000 plus a percentage of revenues;

An Internet radio industry that can not support itself in an ad based economy and pay SoundExchange;

And every fee-based, listener subscription model shutting down.

Don't even try to go down the road of music as a tax and think that everybody is willing to pay for access.

You are running out of resources faster than people can invent them and shooting down every idea that might help a small supportive business survive. All because you cling to the antiquated notion that the royalty system is still valid in a digital economy.

Based on what I see, most of the so called "any piece of crap" musicians you describe above are doing everything in their power to embrace change and adopt technology to try to carve out a living in the music business while the music industry tries to grapple with the ancient control structure that created this mess in the first place just so they can delay progress because believe it or not it is still a $30B industy that needs shelf space.

And BTW thanks for studying up.