Seek Out the Old Geezers:

The industry line has been that file-sharing caused these declines. Others point to the fact that boomers may have finally bought, on CD, copies of all the music they had already purchased on vinyl. And Andreas Schmidt, of the music giant Bertlesmann, said the unsayable: “We didn’t put that much good stuff out.”

Nobody, let’s remember, twisted the arms of the record and movie industries into focusing their product and their marketing muscle almost single-mindedly (if that’s not being too generous) on people in their teens and early 20’s.

They seemed like a great market: easily persuaded, with the free time and the free-floating enthusiasm to see films repeatedly and line up at midnight for sneak releases of “hot” new recordings.

As events have proved, there is one crucial problem with this demographic cohort: it has much more time than money. And, if these music lovers are enrolled at a university, they probably also have access to a superfast Internet connection, which makes the usually cumbersome process of downloading music files as easy as checking your e-mail.

Many people over the age of 25 have been moaning for years, correctly, that nobody is putting out records for them. These people have families, church and community meetings to attend, golf to play and cooking to do. They have careers and disposable incomes. All this makes them far more likely to opt for the convenience of stopping by the record store than trying to figure out how to work Kazaa or Gnutella or any of the other strangely named avenues of Internet commerce avoidance. — Harry Shearer, NY Times