Even the Gray Lady gets it.

Today new albums from Coldplay, the Black Eyed Peas and the White Stripes hit the stores. If you needed to be told that, then you are probably not part of the target audiences for these very popular bands.

Even blowout sales for all three would really do nothing to change the feeling that something is terribly wrong in the music business.

The real problem in the music industry is an addiction to blockbusters, and that is what today is all about -- feeding the monster this industry has become.

The big record companies continue to insist that the only route to profitability is blockbuster sales of a few titles, and the result is all too predictable -- music that matters more for how it sells [1] than how it sounds.

[1] I have always been fond of this little rant by the Jeff Goldblum character in Jurassic Park:

I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're using here: it didn't require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you're selling it, you want to sell it!