What the recording industry refers to as "piracy" will only increase and they only have themselves to thank.
So what are the recording "industry" actually contributing to music?
1. Recording Studios
2. Publicity
3. Publishing
4. Distribution
5. Profits = Increased cost to the consumer
6. Copy-protection systems.
If you set your goals modestly, the first four can now be sourced without the contribution of a recording company, and the last two are not in the artists' interests.
As I see it, artists will increasingly work around the recording companies and act for themselves.
They are capable of organising local concerts for themselves and with the increased availability of low-cost technology; self publishing is more of an option.
Distribution? Internet distribution is an increasing reality, allowing purchase of downloads, and ordering of CDs to be posted.
This behaviour will see musicians operating more and more on the local level, NZ being a good size to call "local", but not constraint.
As the big companies continue to pursue DRM, they will more and more protect only the "international mega-stars", many of which are constructs of the companies anyway, while increasingly artists will dodge around the system, and connect directly with their audience.
At the retail level, a limited range of "approved" CDs only will be available from chain stores with bulk purchasing power (check out your local K-Mart or Warehouse CD department as an example).
The power to break free is in the hands of the artists, they just don’t recognise it, because they are being browbeaten by the recording companies to play *their* game.

And what about this Digital Rights Management (DRM) that the big companies are pursuing?
The only thing that these copy protection schemes will do is stop the CD from being played on a whole bunch of machines and prevent the ripping of the tracks straight from the disk.
As Aardvark suggested, even Telecom are encouraging people to connect their CD player to the audio-in port, and record their music onto their computer.
so, instead of taking about 15 minutes to convert the file, it'll happen in real time.
Why is the audio industry spending so much money doing this when it'll fail anyway, no matter what system is used?
Why are they treating every member of the buying public like a criminal?
You know how aggravating it is to insert a new CD, only to hear your drive whirring and grinding, and making noises that leave you wondering if the drive is actually being damaged?
Audio CDs are frequently impulse purchases. While in town, browse a music store and maybe buy something.
If you can't trust that CDs are actually usable in your CD drives, you don't buy them anymore. Bookstores are a more reliable place to spend browsing money now.
"The frustrating thing is that the RIAA then blames these lost sales on "piracy", when it's directly due to their own stupid tricks."
Why spend millions of dollars on a system that may piss people off if it doesn't work properly and is bound to fail?
So what about when I attempt to play a CD from a non-administrative account without the ability to install drivers? Well it seems that DRM is being integrated into the Intel chip, and will create another access level above administrator. Whatever program is on the CD would have a digital signature approved by the vendor. The OS would then trust the executable, even though you might not.
So the system and this access level, controlled by the DRM vendors, will have ultimate control over features even administrator (or root) can't access! One flaw in the DRM, and we can say goodbye to functional anti-virus software, software firewalls and intrusion detection. Unless, of course, those are managed by (and have the privileges of) the DRM system too. Then that will have the effect of making DRM even more complex and create more weaknesses.
Of course, no virus writer or hacker will *ever* be able to exploit flaws in DRM. Yeah right!
... weren't the original computer viruses spawned from software copy protection systems?
(In the tradition of unauthorised copying, bits of this post were plagerised.)