Point well taken but that doesn't mean the adequate model for the music industry ought not to be that their celebrity comes from the free dissemination of their music and their income from touring alone, or for movies to get their income from theatrical releases. It's the squeezing of the orange thrice that bothers me.
The problem on the music industry end is that it costs money to record, press, and promote a release. The actual production of the physical product isn't that large a portion of it (in our budgets, it's around 10-15%, and we have tiny budgets). That's where my original point on the music/film/etc model comes from--the quality and access to an artist comes from money spent, and a lot of it (not to mention employee salaries, health benefits, etc), on promoting that artist's releases. Without that, people don't hear about the artist, so who would come to the show?
What I see happening in the industry is a lot of the independent workers are leaving, labels and promoters alike, and thus the smaller artist is having an even tougher time of it. Meanwhile, the larger artists--whose rights are usually owned by the larger labels in exchange for the support they put behind them--aren't making as much. The larger labels are hurting but not nearly as much as they'd like you to believe; licensing a Beyonce track to a film is WAY more costly than, say, a Piney Gir track, and the label recoups a ton of it on the major end, and a much smaller portion on the minor. Plus larger labels tend to take money from shows, since they spend a lot promoting them, whereas a lot of indies are hands-off when it comes to money earned at shows. So my main fear is that the live show model is going to destroy the level playing field that, ironically, downloading actually created in its inception.
None of that is to point of the main conversation, of course, just my thoughts on watching the industry intensely for the past 8 years.
