Since the start of the new millennium the Internet has been knocking down the record industry brick by brick. First, came the Napster scandal. On April 13, 2000 the international heavy metal group Metallica filed a lawsuit against Napster, “alleging that the company encourages piracy by enabling and allowing its users to trade copyrighted songs through its services.” www.wired.com/politics/law/news/200/04/35670
Although exposed by the media, this did not stop the creation of similar programs such as Limewire, Kazaa and SoulSeek. The attempt by the industry to regulate illegal downloading has been an extremely slow process that has not allowed for record labels, studios commercial and independent music stores to recover. 
Proof of this inability to recover was when Tower Records announced it would be closing its chain of record stores
in late 2006. This was a devastating blow that is still viewed as a tragedy by the industry. The chain of stores had been
in existence since the 1960's and provided America with close to ninety music retail stores across the country.
Tower Records going out of business, was not only a huge eye opener to the executives of the music industry but proof that
peoples attraction to music was no longer physical.
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