You're joking right?
The mob virtually ran the music business in the 1950s and 1960s. Jukebox trade, labels, payola, the whole deal and had the muscle for enforcement.
Payola didn't end with the diminishing control from the mob. Tommy Shaw said that Styx' "Lady" was sold to radio stations with a trail of cocaine and the corporate suits who determined the playlists (and still do) were called penguins because of the way they followed "snow".
People are free to buy whatever they want, true. But the facetime in magazines, tv, radio, and even hyped on the web through blogs is often funded by the Hollywood hype machine (paid bloggers have been exposed, Sony and others used them). You are effectively shut out from exposure.
ASCAP wouldn't publish race/R&B recordings, hillbilly/western recordings, or the hybrid of the two known as "rock and roll". ASCAP tried to effectively force such music from the marketplace. But BMI would. And stations were willing to play it plus there were clear channel (lower case 'c's) that could be heard across the country. Maybe your community wouldn't play it but a station in another state or even Mexico might.
Eventually the stores were flooded with demands for such recordings and ASCAP blamed the change in market demand on "payola" (which had existed for decades and still exists in radio and elsewhere).
Overall tracked sales are down. If you aren't a soundscan store or don't push enough units to chart, you "don't exist" in the music industry's tally. Yet there are more names in the game than ever before. Smaller piece of the pie for everyone. Plus all of the untracked USED CD and LP sales.
If people think that POLITICAL perspective is not balanced in the media, then wait until you get to examining the way they push music on the low information listeners.
I heard it on The X.
Nothing to add, except to admit that I have a brief first hand experience with the mob and the jukeboxes.
What we are seeing now are the beginnings of a truly free market in the music industry, that is to say outside the mainstream music industry, where the artists manufacture and distribute their own recordings, whether hard copy CDs or downloadable files, that Apple or Amazon stores for them. There is so much good music out there if you look.
I think I mentioned the excellent British band Phat Bollard that supports itself by busking, and pays little attention to CD sales, except those they sell on the street. One reviewer compared them favorably to the mainstream Mumford and Sons. In the past year I’ve discovered a couple of dozen others like them, all through Al Gore’s invention.