A lot of good points, swamptone!
Some development that really annoys me is the fact that music very quickly got run over by the medium video as soon as the Music TeleVision era began. To me this is a horrible marriage.
Not only that music lost a lot of its importance (“Great clip! Hehehehehe”), today it seems you almost can’t sell your music, if you don’t have an accompanying video.
Nowadays you can’t easily fund a music- plus a video-production on your own and take the whole economic risk, if you seriously intend to make a living with pop-music. So this is where the big companies come into play. No wonder that the sponsors want to rule the game in order to make the best possible profit.
I’m afraid, it’s gonna be tough if not impossible for musicians to regain full control over their work though I think, it would be very desirable.