Being related to a whole bunch of musicians, I may not know much outside of articles like this about the "business" of music, but I see artists.
And really, it seems to be sort of obvious. Like many things, recorded music used to take a lot of money and investment to produce--you needed a studio to record it, and experts with fancy hardware to mix it, and big factories to produce expensive records. And then, even if you had a stack of records, you had absolutely no way of actually getting them to anybody--you needed a huge distribution channel.
Hence, the music industry (that's such a sickening term, if you really think about it) positioned itself in there--they acquired the resources, fronted the money to allow the artists to produce a recording, and then used their distribution network to put the recording into the hands of paying customers.
Of course, being an industry, "artists" to them really were no different from the studio--a resource to be acquired and then used to produce product at the lowest possible cost. They weren't doing a service for the artists, it was the other way around, and the barriers to entry were huge so there wasn't any effective competition. Sure, you could play bars, but that wasn't going to get you known anywhere outside the area.
Kinda like car manufacturers--they only need fight with each other, because it costs a fortune to start a new car company.
The system changed. First it got to the point that almost any garage band could make a functional tape, albeit not a polished one. And now, ANYBODY can now afford enough basic hardware to produce an acceptable recording, and ANYBODY can buy the software to mix and produce, and ANYBODY can make a professional-quality CD--the only real limiting factor is skill.
The only thing that the industry had left was the distribution channels. Then came the internet, and the potential for ANYBODY to distribute their music to absolutely anywhere in the world for a price that they consider fair, and almost completely removing the middle man from the profit equation.
The Big Music Companies had a chance when this happened--they could have said "Ok, we'll create a system to facilitate artists getting their music onto the internet," and then used their "expertise" to flog the best artists to increase sales. Except that's a whole hell of a lot less profitable than selling $16.99 CDs and giving only a fraction of the sales to the artist, and as explained in the article in question they weren't about to give up their cash cow.
Which was great until Apple came and did exactly what they feared. Apple was willing to become the middle man for only a reasonable little cut of the profits. Now Amazon, too, or a band can just go solo and sell (or give away) direct. And so now ANYBODY can actually distribute their music for a very small cut of the gross.
So essentially the industry labels have obsoleted themselves through greed. Pretty much they had their chance to be flexible and adapt to a changing world, and they didn't. So every single tear they shed over profit opportunities lost to their shortsightedness is as sweet as honey, so far as I'm concerned.