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A funny thing happened a couple days ago on VH1’s World Series of Pop Culture, and every record label in the world should be scared to death because of it.

In a match-up between Almost Perfect Strangers 2.0 and Remo-Leen-Teen-Teen, the last two contestants, Almost Perfect Strangers’ Lucien and Remo-Leen’s Warren, faced off to decide which team would advance to the semifinals. The category was “Party Like It’s 2006,” and host Pat Kiernan would read a couple lyrics to a pop song, and Lucien and Warren had to name the artist. The songs were by artists like Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera, Shakira and Paris Hilton, all pretty big names.

They didn’t get a single one right.

Think about that for a second. Those songs are only a year old, and these guys, both very knowledgeable trivia buffs, had already forgotten every single one of them. And to drive the point home further, neither one of them was even embarrassed about it. In fact, after the third or fourth missed answer, Lucien laid it out on the table. “I don’t mean to sound like an old fogey, but today’s songs are terrible!”

The audience erupted with applause.

This, to me, is the most awesome thing that possibly could have happened.

Blame illegal downloading all you want, music industry goons, but the real reason you’re losing so much money has less to do with downloading – after all, sales were never higher than when Napster was at its peak – and more to do with the fact that you’re not releasing music worth owning. A few other questionable business decisions also contributed to the decay, such as:

– Allowing your product to be used as a loss leader in order to lure people into stores that don’t specialize in, and therefore place no real emphasis on, music
– Raising the price of your product to nearly $20 per CD, despite the fact that manufacturing costs have gone down
– Completely forsaking artist development, focusing instead on short-term gains

Record labels survived the tough times in the past by having strong back catalogs that could pull in some extra coin when the current crop doesn’t pan out. If the labels think they’re hurting now, what do they think things will be like five or ten years from now, when the back catalog is Paris Hilton, R. Kelly and Fall Out Boy? By missing every question in that category, Lucien and Warren inadvertently summed up everything that is wrong with music today: simply put, the music industry lost respect for its own product, and eventually, so did everyone else.