Is it possible that the music industry has finally spotted the light at the end of the tunnel–and it’s not the flashing light on the oncoming Pirate Express locomotive?

This week a big piece of research has come up with two startling conclusions–that illegal downloading amongst young music fans has actually gone into a decline, and that the CD is still the most popular format, even amongst teenagers, and is not ready to be sent to the digital graveyard just yet.

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It’s sometimes quite amusing to watch how various economic ecosystems grow, where multiple companies have symbiotic relationships, and then start to freak out when they think that other companies in the ecosystem are somehow earning “too much.” That, of course, is at the heart of many recent battles we’ve seen–from net neutrality (where the ISPs think Google is earning too much) to the music industry (where record labels think ISPs and Apple are earning too much). But sometimes it leads to rather amusing contrasts. For example, up in Canada, the entertainment industry is complaining that ISPs earn too much, and therefore are pushing for laws that would require broadband providers to pay money to the entertainment industry to develop new content.

But contrast that to the situation in the U.K., where there’s an ongoing push for content companies to pay extra to help subsidize the cost of broadband deployments. The argument there is that all the content that’s being put online is creating a drain on broadband network resources. But, isn’t that exactly what the content creators in Canada are saying is a “free ride” for the ISPs?

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Can a Metallica album be too loud?

The very thought might seem heretical to fans of the legendary metal band, which has been splitting eardrums with unrivaled power since the early 1980s.

But even though Metallica’s ninth studio release, “Death Magnetic,” is No. 1 on the album chart, with 827,000 copies sold in two weeks, some fans are bitterly disappointed: not by the songs or the performance, but the volume. It’s so loud, they say, you can’t hear the details of the music.

“Death Magnetic” is a flashpoint in a long-running music-industry fight. Over the years, rock and pop artists have increasingly sought to make their recordings sound louder to stand out on the radio, jukeboxes and, especially, iPods.

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