People get music for free - detrimental to artists?

Laetitia has recently expressed concern that because people now get to d/l music pretty much for nothing, this means that records won't be sold as much and it may turn out that musicians may not be able to make a living with music in the future. What would you speculate? Is this indeed the shape of things to come or is it just a tough transitional time and artists might earn from music in some other ways? Just how important is it to sell records in order to earn from music? What do you think?