Nero's Top 40

This Wednesday brings us the 48th Annual Grammy Awards, the night the music industry's finest gather together to award each others' sales -- er, work -- and music lovers the world over mass around their TV screens to see whether this year's ceremony is deeply embarrassing, or just simply mediocre. \nBuzz is gathering that this year's show might be one to watch. Last Wednesday, Grammy officials confirmed that the festivities will kick off with a pairing of genre-defying cartoon superstars, the Gorillaz and Madonna. The act is going to employ cutting-edge holographic technology that renders two-dimensional characters in 3-D -- which should make Madonna look far more realistic. Expect to hear several more variations of this joke during the next few days.\nOf course, looming over the shin-dig like Edgar Allan Poe's raven is the fact that the music industry is about as spry and healthy as the poet's beloved Lenore. Rolling Stone reported Jan. 13 that "2005 saw album sales drop 7.2 percent" and "overall, consumers bought 48 million fewer albums than in 2004, marking a disastrous 21 percent slide from the industry's peak in 2000, according to Nielsen SoundScan." \nThe major labels continue to blame their woes on peer-to-peer networking pirates (yarr), and at least one industry insider told Rolling Stone that 2005's woes were a result of comparison with 2004, which saw releases by mega-acts like U2 and Eminem. \nBut music consumers tell a different story. The Associated Press and Rolling Stone reported that, in a 1,000-person telephone poll, "80 percent of the respondents consider it stealing to download music for free without the copyright holder's permission, and 92 percent say they've never done it." And more significant, the same poll found "that 49 percent of music fans ages 18-to-34 — the target audience for the music business — say music is getting worse." \nOn top of this, small indie labels continue to eat into the majors' share of the pie, claiming 18 percent of 2005 CD sales, despite far fewer marketing resources. And yet, while this is going on, the major labels are worrying about whether people's ability to buy the one or two songs they want will reduce sales of "Greatest Hits" collections.\nLook, I can rattle off a whole slew of ills with the music industry, but I have found no more elegant summary than that provided by DJ Star of syndicated radio show Power 105.1. After quoting Star as saying that the new track by Kevin Federline (i.e. Mr. Britney Spears) is "incredibly horrible," CNN reported Jan. 25 that "Even though Star dissed the record, he vowed to play it ... (and) added that despite the negative feedback, Federline may still have his hit. 'Radio is a mind-altering and conditioning monster within itself,' he says. 'You play something 45,000 times ... you're going to start singing it.'" \nAnd quoth consumers, "Profits? Nevermore"