What If... Friday, March 25, 2011 By Jerry Del Colliano CBS news correspondent Jeff Greenfield has a new book out called “Then Everything Changed”.  What if Bobby Kennedy had proceeded out of his victory speech by taking the planned route instead of the shortcut through the hotel’s kitchen where Sirhan Sirhan shot him dead? What if Bobby Kennedy became President? What is Gerald Ford didn’t get caught up in a misstatement of his own making about communism just in time to get Jimmy Carter elected? What if … what if. That got me to thinking about the what if’s in the media business – radio, records, Internet. The article answers these questions … 1.  What if radio consolidation never happened? 2.  What if the kids of mom and pop operators returning from college were left in charge of coming up with Internet, mobile and social networking strategies and not radio CEOs? 3.  What if a record label bought Napster instead of sued it – what would have happened to music piracy? 4.  What if the major record labels said no to Steve Jobs when he sold them on letting him sell music in the iTunes store as a fix for music piracy? 5.  What if Rupert Murdoch didn’t buy MySpace and the kids who started it continued to run it instead of Murdoch’s traditional media execs trying to monetize it?  Would MySpace be Facebook now instead of being for sale? 6.  And what if MySpace continued to concentrate on music instead of imitating Facebook – would Murdoch now own the new portal to music discovery and not Steve Jobs? 7.  What if Google tried to invent YouTube instead of buying it from a handful of kids for $1.8 billion? 8.  What if the record labels jointly with radio companies invented iTunes before Apple? 9.  If they had, who would be the Apple of today? If you would like to read this story, have access to my entire archive (over 1,200 pieces) and get the next month of my writing included, click “read more” for your choices.  Read more at Inside Music Media You are receiving this email because you are a subscriber to Inside Music Media Click here to unsubscribe or manage your account.