The music industry claims to have lost billions of dollars in record sales due to piracy on the Internet. But the positive impact of tunes in cyberspace is never mentioned.

The Internet gives us the ability to call a friend and say, “Go preview this album,” which can contribute to album sales from every part of the world.

Quite a lot of music is undoubtedly downloaded from sites like www.thepiratebay.org, but many music-sharing sites include messages in their commentary that urge, “If you like the band, buy the album.”

Record industry moguls can no longer afford to sit in their dark recording studios and keep a large portion of the profits for themselves.

Major bands like Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead have already figured out they can record and distribute their own albums without the help of record companies.

And the future holds even more direct interaction with the artists.

Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor broke serious ground on Feb. 16, 2008, when he released the album, “Ghosts,” and allowed his fans to download the first disc of the album for free.

Reznor has also released a number of songs in their raw production files, encouraging his fans to re-mix and change the music as they please.

The music Reznor released online is licensed under something called Creative Commons, allowing the consumer to share, copy, perform and re-mix the work, providing it is not used for commercial purposes. Creative Commons has become popular with many artists, who believe music should be a form of creative expression, not a boxed product.

Bands that release their music in this manner gain huge publicity due to sites like Digg. com and its huge number of readers. When

Radiohead released its album, “In Rainbows,” to the web, fans were encouraged to download it and pay whatever they thought the music was worth.

These are the kinds of innovations the music industry really needs.