While they come from widely different backgrounds, all of these apps seek the same goals: grab an artist's audience, engage them, and monetize that engagement, digitally of course--with advertising, brand sponsors, "in app" purchases, or on rarer occasions, by selling recorded music.

While others wish to send the monster back under his bed, I won't. I want him to stay right out in front of our eyes. And I want critics to really turn an ear to their own sidestepping rhetoric.

Apple Music could have a future that more closely resembles music services from large tech titans like Amazon, Google, or Microsoft's Xbox Music. All of these have respectable if not game-changing digital music services.

It's not clear where all this plays out, but meeting many across the music industry this past year, I saw a clear picture of an industry trying to reinvent itself. And while labels still have an important role, the new equilibrium brings a healthy competitive balance to the market.