This is an inconvenience, especially for discovering new musicians, agreed. It won't affect me personally.
I didn't even know that there were restrictions on the Canadian site, which is probably why I thought that YouTube sucked ass anyway. I use a variety of other means for discovering new music.
There are also sites that can let you listen to only the audio file from YouTube, as a proxy. No downloading, though.
As to the music industry, I would say that they are as hard as iron. When the times change, they stiffen, and resist, and break, for iron cannot bend.
Let's hope that happens soon.
They are a collaboration of ultra-rich corporate bastards that take money from artists, thus stealing the gains from the proper recipients, and propagate a "music-for-profit" culture that promotes a singular, one-type music formula meant not to express the human condition, but to gain profits for the recording labels involved. It is this "music-for-profit" culture today that drove strong, actual, music underground, which is only now making a comeback. For example, a group of influential artists in Canada, heavily involved in the scene for decades, having sold many albums and been generally successful, while staying true to their art, have formed an artist's label collective. It's a by-the-artists, for-the-artists initiative to bypass the greedy and heavy-handed tactics of the RIAA and its similarly styled companies.