There’s been a whole lot of debate about whether or not the internet is the monster eating away at music industry profits.

What if the internet has nothing to do with it?

We’ve long known that video killed radio as the key driver of massively marketable songs and artists (the shift officially took place around the time a cut midriff started counting for more than, say, a killer riff on a Fender Strat).

But what if that key driver disappeared? What if MTV and VH1 – the networks that dominated music marketing and replaced the Wolfman Jacks of the world – suddenly stopped pushing the product?

Chances are sales would decrease, no?

And that’s exactly what happened. When is the last time you saw a music video on VH-1? You might catch an occasional outtake between not so real life peeks into the surreal lives of former stars, but that’s about it.

Peter Brady, Hulk Hogan, and Ozzy are the ones who have hurt music sales.

The irony in all of this will be that the internet – with video delivery tools from You Tube to Google to iTunes to Launch to Urge – is the very vehicle that can bring music sales back.

Maybe the next selection of Surreal Life cast members should be culled from former music industry big wigs who were convinced the net was their ultimate foe. A season as an opening act to Hulk Hogan’s family would serve them right.

Evil-Doers and border guarding vigilantes make for more interesting headlines but the real battle of this generation is probably not terrorism (or Iraq or the war on drugs, ha, or side details like immigration). It’s a topic that is often discussed in the past tense in the U.S.

It’s AIDS:

Since June 5, 1981, HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, has killed more than 25 million people, infected 40 million others and left a legacy of unspeakable loss, hardship, fear and despair.

Its spread was hastened by ignorance, prejudice, denial and the freedoms of the sexual revolution. Along the way from oddity to pandemic, AIDS changed they way people live and love…

In the worst case, sub-Saharan Africa, it has been devastating. And the next 25 years of AIDS promise to be deadlier than the first.

AIDS could kill 31 million people in India and 18 million in China by 2025, according to projections by U.N. population researchers. By then in Africa, where AIDS likely began and where the virus has wrought the most devastation, researchers said the toll could reach 100 million.