The Towers Have Fallen

More people may be jobless due to the collapse of Tower Records than the collapse of the WTC towers. Tower was a huge music chain. Over 200 stores and 6000 employees.
Over two years ago, February 2004, music attorney Jerry Reisman said that people "buying CDs are no longer shopping at Tower. They are taking the music online without having to pay for it." Tower filed for bankruptcy protection in a desperate attempt to pay off debts and stay in business. Internet piracy only got worse in the past two years, as more bloggers joined the cry of "let's kill the record stores!"

Yes, the problem was "especially the exploding popularity of downloading music for free from the Internet." If you think I'm slanting this story check:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/02/09/entertainment/main599008.shtml

From $1 billion in its heyday, to bankruptcy. For two agonizing years these burn victims struggled to keep Tower alive, while bloggers ignorant of the costs of buying merchandise, or paying employees and landords jeered, "we are vehemently opposed to being told what price to pay" and "record stores that go bankrupt get what they deserve!" Even when back-catalog CDs were often offered dirt cheap.

On Oct. 6, a U.S. federal bankruptcy judge officially ended, by liquidation, Tower Records. Across the world, record stores are closing, large and small, as endangered as wild tigers or the polar ice cap, the result of a cancer called greed and diseases of conceit and selfishness.

From sharing a few songs, it escalated to entire discographies and a bunch of drones compulsively throwing dozens of albums on the Net every day. Sharing? No, it became "let's get everything free and screw record stores." The thoughtless termites and leeches were too busy being parasites to care about the consequences or understand what they were destroying.