I can’t say I’m very surprised by the latest reports of trouble at Billboard magazine. Louis Hau (a big Korea booster who in fact preceded me in Korea with Billboard and several publications, although we never met) is out, along with publisher Lisa Howard and several top editors. Billboard Pro, the DIY-indie sub site, has been closed. Although for me, the most surprising thing is probably that the industry anachronism journal has lasted this long without the brutal bloodletting that The Hollywood Reporter has suffered (sure, Billboard suffered, just not as badly). I always liked my editors at THR, at least on the international side of things, even if the magazine was an out-of-date business model. But at Billboard … well, not so much.

The cronyism with the industry that the Billboard editors were supposed to be covering was much deeper and more endemic. It felt like they were constantly trying to turn the clock back to 1998, before that nasty Internet came along and ruined everything.

If there is a major takeaway I hope people have to my writing in general (and today’s story in the International Herald Tribune), it is that the Internet and globalizations have fundamentally changed the power relationship between artists (or “producers”), fans (or “consumers”), and the music industry (“who knows?”). Gatekeeping isn’t what it used to be.

Oh, a bonus chart from Digital Music News about singles sales, just for fun:

This .gif animation mapping changes in music sales over the past 30 years is pretty cool, too.