The piracy-riven Chinese music industry isn't a vestigal remnant of China's underdeveloped, lawless past - it's the future of the music business around the world:
Music pirating is so rampant and so entrenched in China that it's unlikely to ever be eradicated. Chinese consumers have come to believe that music is worth, at most, a few cents a song, and that copying and sharing music are totally acceptable. In all probability, no company will ever be able to sell $15 CDs or 99 cents-a-song downloads in the world's most populous nation.
The International Federation of Phonographic Industry, which tracks music copyright issues worldwide, agrees. It figures 95% of music sales in China are of pirated copies. Instead of predicting that China will change as it engages with the global economy, the federation warns that China is, in fact, the leader. The federation's chairman, Jay Berman, has been quoted as saying, "The business model for the record industry worldwide is moving toward resembling what we see in China today."
The changes are already happening in America too, of course, though much more slowly.
Chinese rock stars aren't getting as wealthy as, say, Michael Jackson, but Quek raises an interesting question: Why should they? Only a relatively few American rockers ever sell enough CDs to get fabulously rich. Should society care if rockers can't afford to build their own backyard amusement parks?
The vast majority of music artists bob along in the middle. They don't sell enough CDs to earn out their advances. They earn a living on the road and maybe from publishing royalties if they write songs. Such artists would benefit if the industry shifted to a model that includes more — and more innovative — ways for artists to make money.
I touched on this a couple of months ago - "Rich Musicians Vs. Good Music":
The important thing to keep in mind, I think, is that the issue of how much money artists will be able to reasonably extract from consumers in the future of cheap-and-easy music production and distribution is entirely separate from the issue of whether music will keep getting more and more insanely awesome, which is pretty much a foregone conclusion. There are maybe 30 bands/'artists' in the US that deserve to get rich off their music, maybe 300 or so that deserve to make a living at it* - everyone else should be happy to make a buck when they can and be thrilled that anybody wants to pay to hear them at all. The means of production and distribution/consumption are getting easier to use and cheaper to acquire - there are just way too many great bands, and there's less and less justification for paying all this money to listen to their music. As Chuck D said at his 2002 CMJ keynote, "Motherfuckers [trying to preserve traditional Big Music profits] tryna stop the clouds from rainin'". Fortunately, making music is easy and more fun than most other things you can do with your spare time anyway, and I can't really think of any band/'artist' offhand whose work really benefitted from being absurdly rich**-
You'll have to read the post for the bonus asterisked material, but I'll tell you right off that you're better off using your time to just read the entire USAT China story.