I'm not sure I agree because the music industry hasn't gone 100% digital. The digital side of the music business is balanced by the continued prescence of a physical product. Not to mention the nature of the product... audio emission, makes it very difficult to limit access since anyone can hear a song being played and with the right equipment capture, clean it up, and duplicate it. Barring some kind of direct-to-brain stimulation music has a practical barrier in that it can only become so expensive given it's nature and the ease of copying it outside of the discs/hardware.
There is also the collector's market for music, records, 8-tracks, CDs, and other physical media have an intristic value that actually increases in many cases, unlike video games... where such things happen very, very rarely and usually represent far more of an exception rather than the rule. To be honest I've long felt that one of the reasons why the gaming industry has wanted to move into digital media so heavily is that despite splattering "collector's edition" on everything they can to demand more money, I think it doesn't want to deal with an actual collector's market on that level which could become quite powerful and wind up leveraging it. Believe it or not as a whole the music industry IS greatly influanced by former market penetration.
I'm probably not articulating this well, or explaining it well enough, but the point is that going entirely digital is a bad thing for consumers.
It's important to note that aside from everything I've said above, media companies have been going out of their way to do everything they can to control the internet and limit the free exchange of information. At the same time they are pushing to go digital, they are also pushing to put themselves into a position where they can't be challenged online.
Right now the endgame seems to be to force the internet into a position where media industries, like the gaming industry, have the power to shut people down pretty much on a whim for their own "protection". When physical media is gone the idea is that all video games will come from digital platforms like STEAM or Origin, which will be the only option so they can feel free to set the prices. They will have the abillity to effectively nuke anyone they even suspect is guilty of an IP violation, with proposed laws that are increasingly going inthe direction of the accused having to prove their innocence as opposed to the accuser to prove guilt, while taking down the site and information in question while things are being decided. This means that these small publishers that might otherwise be "empowered" are ultimatly forced to see the publishers to have their work distributed through their services. Those who buck the system, by running their own sites, and actually get enough exposure and/or a quality product to provide competition can be shut down out of hand since a big company just has to scream wolf, and unleash their highly paid lawyers. Sure, they might lose, but by the time they do the product they were out to squash will be outdated and obselete. People wonder why big companies horde IPs, well this is one of the reasons why, and hot that will be used, the idea being that they can find something similar to what someone they don't like is doing (when the target is weak enough) and launch a suit. Win or lose, by the time things are settled the guy on the receiving end is out of the game, all it would take to knock a lot of these small developers out of the water would be a year or so of inactivity and when it can take months to even get into court after a desist order, while waiting for things to be settled, that's enough.
See, a lot of the current issues we're looking at now all fit together as part of an overall plan. You also have to look at trends, see the industry is heavily invested in things like SOPA and the power it gives, it's a key part of their long term marketing plans. If things like SOPA are stopped, it just means that they will immediatly relaunch the same thing under a differant name, continually hammering the system until they eventually get it through... and honestly at this level it's increasingly about lobbyists than what people actually think. When it comes to business policies like this it's typically a matter of paying off the politicians, and then the politicians themselves spin the desician to convince people that what they did was the right call. That sounds totally borked... but that's what we're looking at.
Those thinking "well, people will never stand for it!" are sort of missing the point. In general gamers have never been able to form a unified front, we whine, but ultimatly spend money on all these "project $10" type schemes, digital content, and games loaded with DRM and malware. The industry ignores us because they get our money anyway... people complain about the lack of dedicated servers for say Modern Warfare 2? Does it matter when the series not only broke records then, but continues to break more and more of them with each installment? The protests over the release of "Left for Dead 2" before the promised support for the firsr game? Does it matter with the number of copies the sequel sold?
The music industry was kind of late to the game, by the time it decided to get really brutal it had already created subtantial groups of people who both could, and would stand against them. Not to mention the nature of their product which doesn't exist entirely inside of a computer (ie it's projected sound... where witgh a game the projections are only part of the whole, you can't get a game by recording just the noise and then cleaning it up). The gaming industry seems to be wise enough to try and prevent this from happening. There isn't even a collector's market buying up CDs, comics, or whatever by the thousands, because things like game cartridges which have increased in value are compairively rare... where really, almost any record that is a couple of decades old is probably worth more than you initially paid for it to someone. Nobody ran out to buy games (and it's now impossible with the physical copies usually just being links to digital services) in hopes they would increase in value, unlike tghe situation with music... and especially comics, where you might see people buying multiple copies of every first issue in hopes that one or more series will be a big deal in a decade or three with the price increasing.... and that is one of the reasons why comics and music are never likely to go entirely digital.
