Two things happened this month that ought to be read together, and I have not seen anyone put them side by side.
Amazon opened a music store selling plain MP3 files with no copy protection at all, playable anywhere, with catalogue from EMI and Universal. And Radiohead released a record directly from their own website with no label involved and no fixed price, inviting people to pay whatever they thought it was worth.
The second one got most of the attention because it makes a better headline. The first one is more important, and it is more important for a reason the labels are going to regret.
For most of a decade the industry position on copy protection was that it existed to prevent piracy. Every conversation about removing it ran into the same wall. Unprotected files would be shared, sharing would destroy sales, and therefore protection was non-negotiable regardless of how much it inconvenienced people who had paid.
Those same labels have now handed unprotected files to Amazon.
Not because piracy stopped. Because Apple got too strong. Protected tracks bought from iTunes only play properly on Apple hardware, which means every purchase makes a customer slightly less able to leave, and after several years of that the labels found themselves negotiating with a distributor who could set terms. Handing a competitor the one thing Apple could not match was the available lever, and they pulled it.
Fine as tactics. Ruinous as an argument. They have demonstrated, using their own catalogue, that copy protection was a negotiating instrument rather than an anti-piracy measure, and that when it stopped serving them commercially they dropped it in a week.
Nobody in that industry gets to make the piracy argument with a straight face again.
The Radiohead release matters in a narrower way than the coverage suggests. A band with a global audience built over fifteen years on a major label can skip the label. That is a fact about Radiohead more than a fact about the music business, and the acts most in need of an alternative to the label system are precisely the ones who cannot do this. Still, it establishes that the distribution part of what a label does is now optional, and once something is optional for the biggest acts it starts being negotiable for everyone below them.
My expectation is that Apple ends up with unprotected catalogue from every major label inside eighteen months. Once your competitor is selling the same songs without restrictions, keeping restrictions is just a reason for customers to shop elsewhere, and Apple has never been sentimental about a position that stopped working.
Which would mean the labels spent a decade defending a technology, gave it away to hurt a distributor, and ended up with neither the technology nor a weaker distributor.