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Music sales are down again this year, and sooner or later the industry has to start looking at the product its putting out.

There will always be interesting new works, but overall, music has gone to hell over the last decade. I’ve been complaining about the lack of a new music genre for nearly a decade, but the creativity level in music overall is really looking grim.

One thing that has kept the industry afloat is hip-hop. Every year, there always seems to be a few hip-hop tracks that become huge hits. I’m not a big fan, but I certainly have an appreciation for a wide spectrum of music. Over the past year, I kept remarking that there are no memorable or lasting hip-hop songs.

This New York Times article confirms my suspicion, 2007 has been a very difficult year for hip-hop.

You know the music industry is going down the tubes, when they can’t even produce a few hit rap songs.

Many years ago on Phataudio.org, I proposed that artists should take charge of their own electronic distribution and promotion, instead of depending on record companies. Bands like Phish started doing this years ago, and now Radiohead has made a big splash with its pay “whatever you want system.”

I reluctantly paid $12 for “In Rainbows.” I was reluctant because there were no details on what format the music would be distributed in, then yesterday I get a notification from Radiohead that the tracks were available as 160k MP3’s!

This is a revolution? Your giving me digital music at a sound quality that is not even close to reaching the level of a CD, a format that came out 20 years ago. Nice try Radiohead, but 160k MP3’s are not going to cut it. Give me lossless, or at least offer an affordable CD option.

This is why I continue to buy CD’s. Commercial digital music quality is simply horrible.

One positive note, the album is actually very good.

Remember the music video? Twenty years ago, music videos were actually creative, even mainstream productions were interesting. Budgets could reach in the 5-10 million range for the big artists, like Madonna or U2 back in the early 90’s.

Today, the only time I ever come across music videos is at the gym, because record companies pay the gym to show them.. MTV (Music Television) stopped showing videos over a decade ago for the most part.

Even with the creative drought in the music industry today, I can usually find 5-10 new bands a year worth listening to. “The Hold Steady,” are not only worth listening, but their videos are entertaining as well.

I’m very impressed with Steve’s Job’s “Thoughts on Music.’ Its the same viewpoint I’ve been pushing for years. The numbers prove that DRM is useless.

Today’s most popular iPod holds 1000 songs, and research tells us that the average iPod is nearly full. This means that only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM. The remaining 97% of the music is unprotected and playable on any player that can play the open formats.

So if the music companies are selling over 90 percent of their music DRM-free, what benefits do they get from selling the remaining small percentage of their music encumbered with a DRM system? There appear to be none. If anything, the technical expertise and overhead required to create, operate and update a DRM system has limited the number of participants selling DRM protected music.