Crumbling industry aside, people are still making music, and there are a lot of folks trying to pick up the slack on the business side of things to help make the transition into the professional music world slightly less wretched. Here’s a bit of a primer on a few music services that are attractive to both artists and fans alike.

The RIAA cites the number of dollars lost to the illegal online music trade to be somewhere around $4.2 billion per year. Their calculations are presumably based on the inflated Internet rate of a dollar a song, so we can dismiss at least some of the bulk in the figure right there, but it’s [...]