The New York Times picks up on last week's announcement of a study by researchers at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina that questions the music industry's claims of doom at the hands of file sharers. Instead of surveying users (who's really going to admit to downloading files these days?), they looked at actual file download statistics and asessed their impact on music sales. Their verdict: the impact is near-nil, almost none whatsoever. In the meantime rock/funk legend (formerly known as) Prince was launching his own lifestyle-oriented Web site for fans from which they can download his latest album with Entriq-engineered rights management, while boutique Internet radio stations such as Harris Radio feature local indie artists as a promotional and community-building channel. What's this all add up to? In a nutshell, the music industry and advertising industry helped to kill the primary content outlet from which people gain interest in artists: radio. File downloaders are in effect filling in the gaps left by a music industry that does a miserable job of building interest in individual artists both old and new, leaving it to grass-roots efforts that are not tied to the financial models of traditional broadcast media and content distribution. Internet radio has the advantage of being able to build interest in artists on a very personalized and specialized basis, with relatively unlimited bandwidth in any marketplace to reach those interests with near-zero overhead. Like print, the music industry is having difficulty adapting to an era in which it no longer controls the primary production and distribution processes for content and cannot adapt easily to today's premium content business which requires building content value contextually within an engaged community. The broadcast/production model for premium content is not dead, but when both supply and bandwidth are limitless it needs to rethink itself in light of what interactive, community-based publishing can do to build demand.