Following up on the post below, I'm not advocating that artists and record companies give all their product away for free. I recognize that there are legitimate IP/copyright concerns. The point is simply that the industry has spent the last decade or so focused on trying to maintain their old marketing/distribution models instead of recognizing the new reality and figuring out how to exploit it. That may, in fact, involve giving away lots of content for free. Or maybe not. But radio stations have been giving away content for free for decades, sometimes after large checks were written to them by record companies.
The point is that the internet and .mp3s are here, they aren't going away, and instead of fighting it record companies need to figure out how to creatively exploit that to, yes, hopefully make lots of money.