Dave Winer discusses AOL but makes a profound general point about how the music industry should deal with digital music: make a distinction between new stuff and archives.
Its a very elegant solution. At the moment you have copyrighted media and non-copyrighted media. Classic books that are out of copyright are much cheaper than new ones. The cost being not much more than the printing and distribution.
The archive solution creates three categories of digital media: copyright held new media that is being marketed and is paid for on an individual basis; copyright held media that is no longer being marketed and is sold as part of a bulk subscription to an archive; non copyright held media which is free since with digital media there are zero distribution or reproduction costs.