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+The verdict is in. The RIAA has won its first jury case and is already gloating about having struck fear in the hearts of file sharing music lovers everywhere. But it doesn't matter. When an industry reaches the point it must sue its customers to maintain its business model the industry is already dead. 
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+For many that have come up in the era of web-based music there's a certain glee in watching the old guard fall. But there's no need to dance on the music industry's grave. Its final collapse won't be pretty -- people will lose their jobs, companies will go bankrupt.
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+But something new will be born. As any anthropologist can tell you there was music before the recording industry and there will be music long after it is gone. Rather than debate the finer points of the industry's inevitable collapse, I want to tell you about the future.
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+The future of music will look something like the Songbird application. Songbird is essentially a music player -- playlists, libraries, all the things you'll also find in iTunes and similar applications. 
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+But where iTunes is still representative of the old guard -- every recent revision has primarily been about offering new ways to sell you music -- Songbird incorporates the old and gives direction to the new.
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+The future is free. The future is on the web and its primary model is not selling you music, but helping you discover it. And that's why Songbird features a built in web browser that enables you to seamlessly browse and listen to music from MP3 blogs, radio stations like Pandora and music history and culture on sites like wikipedia and last.fm. 
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+With MySpace currently boasting far more bands than any record label can offer, is it any wonder that we turn to the web for music?
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+With Songbird you browse the web looking for music and, provided the site is properly coded Songbird will discover all the linked MP3s and put them in a playlist just below the browser window. You can pause and play tracks as if they were already part of your music collection.
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+Find a track you like on the web and drag it to your library -- it's yours now. Songbird doesn't support DRM files and hopefully it never will.
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+As Michael Arrington recently wrote, the whole digital music industry is making an inexorable move toward free. In part this is driven by the relatively low cost of today's recording equipment, but it's also a nature result of the online market.
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+Earlier this year the going rate for a DRM free track on iTunes was $1.29, but now, Amazon has jumped into to compete and the price there has already fallen to just $.89 in many cases. Sites like Amie street offer music at whatever price the demand for a song will bear. Radiohead recently skipped its record company and decided to offer its new album online for whatever you'd like to pay. Prince is giving away his music with the Sunday paper.
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+At the moment these are isolated case, but Arrington is right, an epidemic of free is not far off.
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+And Songbird anticipates this with it's web features. Sure, it can still manage your iPod and music collection, but more than anything Songbird encourages you not to listen to the same tracks you already know, but to explore and discover new music.
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+Songbird is often called the Firefox of jukebox applications, in part because it falls loosely under the Mozilla umbrella, but also because Songbird makes music exciting again in the same way that Firefox made the web fun again.
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+At the moment Songbird is still a developer release, not really meant for the public, but in the two weeks I've been using it, it's been just as solid and considerably snappier than iTunes, which is currently sitting at version 7.
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+So if the recent RIAA case has you down, a bit disappointed perhaps that the companies in charge of supplying you music are in fact more interested in policing how you use it, head over to the Songbird site and give it a try, you just might discover what the future of online music looks like.
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+As someone who grew up hanging out at the local record store, chatting with clerks and watching bands play in-store performances will I miss the old record industry and its accruements? Yes, for a while, but it was always about the music, and the music will always continue.
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