Can the music industry finally make song sharing work for it, not against it?

There has never been a Mozart of the greeting card industry, nor an Elvis, nor a Springsteen, and nonetheless the U.S. greeting card industry takes in $7.5 billion a year. That's around the same as what the U.S. recording industry gets from selling CDs and two-thirds of all the revenue from music sales. The greeting card business manages to do this despite the facts that there is no single card that's a blockbuster hit, that it has no broadcast industry behind it to promote greeting card sales, that you cannot sample its products on YouTube—and maybe, most notably, that its very simple product has to be delivered personally or be sent by plain old postal mail. With a 42-cent stamp, too.

One distinctive thing about greeting cards that has kept the industry afloat despite all the marks against it in the digital age is that you do not send a birthday card (or, let's really hope, a Valentine's Day card) to yourself. Cards are bought for other people. So, sometimes, is music. And books. And, in the future, movies. That's something the media industry is just now waking up to.

Since the release of the latest version of iTunes in September, it's been possible to use iTunes to send a song, or even the digital equivalent of a whole mix tape (remember that not-quite-obsolete art form?) to someone else right from iTunes. Possible, though not exactly intuitive. I didn't know you could until I was shown by a more iTunes-aware colleague. It involves clicking a little arrow to the right of the song in your collection (so that's what those are about!), then clicking the "Gift This Music" icon positioned so you are nearly certain that you're going to buy the whole album, and then a few more clicks to get it done. But the music does get delivered, digitally, and goes right into your recipient's iTunes library.

Perfect it's not, but it's a start, and a lot better than you were able to do just a few months ago, and certainly better than you can do through any other music-buying service. You can stream your music onto your MySpace page, but you cannot automatically buy music to be added to a friend's collection.

This is MySpace, whose whole business model, like that of every youth network in history, depends on marketing music. ("Music and pimple cream," an old reporter friend of mine used to say when he talked about what you can advertise to teens.)

Awkward as it is to use to send a single song (it is more intuitive if you want to send a full album), iTunes' gift option is already a huge advance for the music industry. For a decade, the industry saw music sharing in only one way: as a threat to its viability. You might imagine that a business that 25 years ago was up in arms about the advent of the cassette recorder might have had time to come up with a new philosophy, but it hasn't. Just as it hated the mix tape then, it hates the idea of passing on a song now. There are obviously much better reasons for fearing online music sharing now than there were for fearing home taping then—but there are some really good reasons for loving it, too.