The death of the pop music industry has been predicted for years — and certainly since Apple launched a whizzy device called an iPod back in The rise of free or pirated music online and the declining sales of CDs has at the same time been wielded as a cautionary tale about the power of the internet. Allen, who took a four-year break to bring up her children, has claimed that pop stars now make most of their money from turning up to awards ceremonies and product events. Pointless stuff. How much do they pay? These reveal that the top-selling product in was the video-game Grand Theft Auto Vwhich sold 3. Only a decade ago — the days when Dido, Coldplay and James Blunt were hit machines — it was not uncommon for an album to sell more than three million copies. The problem is that people just do not buy music in the quantity that they used to. They either pick and choose the odd single, or they stream music on services such as Spotify or YouTube, often free of charge. But this does not mean...