Remember when music used to come on coasters?
Know what the biggest weakness in the music industry is? Not the pirates or the peer-to-peer networks, they're just facilitators.

It's CDs. Yep, the one last physical product of the industry worth buying is the one thing that allows high quality copying without restriction. Audio CDs can be duplicated without limitation, a track can be ripped to high resolution MP3 in a matter of seconds. An album can go from a CD to being posted online in less than an hour and can then be reproduced endlessly with no embedded indication of its transition point, no definitive way to tell who has accomplished the format change (which is why the lawyers are going after those who end up with the files rather than the people who created them).

I like CDs because I'll never have to worry about changing machines, or platforms, or technology. I can take my MP3s anywhere, and if absolutely necessary I can go back to the physical media to rip them into a new format. And you know what? If a friend of mine likes an album I can physically copy it for him in no time at all. It will cost me just a few cent and will save him sixteen euro or more.

When one person buys a CD there is the opportunity for two or three or twelve or two-thousand people to receive the benefit from that one purchase. This cannot be said for the proprietary digital formats such as that used by iTunes which is so secure it can only be used on a handful of products (incidentally making it quite unenticing to anyone with any sense of value and the option to buy something more user-friendly). That's why iTunes sales make up such a small proportion of the music held on iPods today; those players are holding huge amalgamated collections made up from two or three people's entire CD collections, swapped and borrowed and copied and ripped for just that purpose. These days when a group of friends likes a new album they only have to buy one CD and copy it between them. If your best friend asked for a copy of one of your CDs would you tell them to go buy their own? Of course not!

That's what's killing the music industry, not deliberate piracy but common courtesy, community spirit, simple friendship.

I think you can already guess what needs to be done, how the industry can save itself. Just stop making CDs. Force everyone to switch to proprietary music formats fixed to specific player IDs with no easy path to any other system. Customers will switch because they have no choice, the average music lover will stop the copying and sharing because they will have lost the simplicity of the current methods. There will still be methods involving software patches, format translators and DRM strippers, but that will be for the geeks, not something the common user would dare try. Everyone else who wants a piece of music will have to purchase their own.

CDs and CD burning will still be around for indy bands to make use of, allowing them to distribute their work in the interests of self-promotion. But even that will die out as the technology falls into general disuse.

It will cost thousands, even tens of thousands of jobs, perhaps eventually hundreds of thousands world-wide. Remember we're not just talking about the stores and their employees, but also the distribution services, the delivery drivers, CD factories, packaging designers and printers, the factories that produce the jewel cases, the engineering services that build the pressing and casting machines, the construction companies who build and refurbish the factories, the renting services and landowners. An endless list of people who's livelihood depends upon those little plastic circles.

But that's okay because the music industry will be saved.

And it's going to happen anyway, one way or another.