After all, the very first massmarket musical recordings were made to promote performers over the radio so listeners would come to see live performances.
There is a way to make money off digital music - it's just that it won't have the fat margins to which the RIAA has become accustomed.
I've often wondered why the recording industry is so afraid of people downloading MP3s for free yet so eager to have radio play their songs so that the consumers can hear them...for free! It's an interesting paradox that I have yet to figure out. In fact, there have been scandals over the years (payola) in which the record companies PAID radio stations to play their music so that people could hear them for free!
Now I understand that the reason the recording industry wants to promote free airplay for their product is so that the people listening at home will run out and buy the product. Well, they can accomplish the same thing with MP3s if they weren't so bull-headed about it. Your average radio station only has an active playlist of maybe 80 songs - usually around 50 current and 30 "recurrent" (older songs brought back into rotation for a short time). Therefore there are thousands of other songs that will never be played on the radio, even though they too are airworthy. The Internet is the perfect medium to get this music heard. There may only be 50,000 fans of a certain brand of music (let's call it Cajun bluegrass for the sake of this discussion). Now chances are, there is a lot of this type of music out there that these 50,000 fans have never been exposed to. Make the MP3s available online at a low bitrate (say 128Kbps) and those 50,000 people will be brought together to the slice of the web in which this type of music is available. You will now be able to target the entire fanbase of this particular obscure brand of music, greatly increasing your chances of selling them CDs (or higher bitrate digital downloads for a nominal fee).