Wow, yet another huge concession by the music industry. Music piracy is like a mass protest right now, and half the people participating don’t even recognize the significance of their actions.

So a company like Ruckus builds an app and gets to be a kind of middleman, “selling” college students’ attention to both labels and advertisers. What a great deal for Ruckus. They’re like YouTube, but rather than rely on user-generated content, they’ll rely on label-generated content.

But why do we need a separate company to do this? Does the music industry’s business model not give them room to seek attention directly, advertise to it, and cash in that way? MTV has lived off of advertising forever. So, given the fall of CDs, why aren’t we seeing labels transition into “media” companies?

Maybe because they’re already pwned by bigger “media” companies?