Thanks for the image Annoying, it gave me a great idea for some depth and a little entertainment in my report.
As for Medium, I did read all of that and must say on most points I agree. Something that I didn't find yet, however, is a solution.
In my mind changes in the entertainment industry are well overdue. There are some very good signs of evolution though. For example TV series are being streamed online (legally) by
the CW among others (US only for the moment).
My solution is to go a step further and put legal downloads of your product (in this case TV episodes) in which you incorporate advertisements. It's been proven to work for broadcasting, so why shouldn't it work for the entire entertainment industry? When movies are out on DVD for (let's say) 2 weeks, allow legal downloads. When your CD has been out for two weeks, put all of the tracks for free download and streaming on your official website. (The smaller artists already do this and I'd figure they are the ones who actually need to earn money.)
This solution does 2 things:
1) You can earn a lot through advertisements. Not only the ones in the product, but also the ones on your website.
(A side-note here. You can combine this with a very simple log-in feature so you have a database of consumers, with their interests, you could e-mail special offers to. For example when their favorite band comes to their country/state or when a sequel of a movie they downloaded comes out in the cinema. )
2) You get people on your website, where they'll see others of your products, your live shows, other movies coming to a cinema near you, etc ...