I know that I still appreciate the physical part of the media. Something about the heft of it. The liner notes. The jewel case. The satisfaction of ownership.
But the boxes of those I have thus far prove so cumbersome. Guess I'm a dinosaur conflicted...

But who are the biggest advocates for public libraries? .
Writers..
Why, when, at least in the US, writers LOSE money when people borrow their books from the library?.
Maybe this tells us who the real Artists are..

just as a footnote to lintlass' comment: the thinking of the music industry corporate heads is so out of touch that instead of charging less for a product in not-so-great demand, they violate high school economics axioms and charge more. dodo heads going the way of the dodo.

At least one revolution is working.

Itunes is da bomb, you get what you want when you want it in the quanity that you want. Let the corporate leeches starve.

...and I fail to see how copying something that you never would have bought to begin with is theft. There was no loss of revenue or product. But I understand the law so that's why I don't do it!

I've purchased one CD retail in my life. It was The Beastie Boys - Check Your Head when I was 15. I recently bought about 5 discs from Amazon used, for like 2 buck each. Why would I ever want a jewel case and a CD? Then I just have to rip it to get it onto my computer anyways. I hear all the music I want on Sirius, my Ipod and Pandora.com. If it can be listened to or seen, it can be copied. Fact of life.

Let's see. The average price of a new current music CD is around $17. The average wage for a teenager is probably around $6 per hour, minus income tax. So a teenager has to invest 4 hours of work to buy a single CD. Probably most of a typical fast-food shift.

There's the math...

Yes the days of Del Shannon selling 20,000 copies a day of "Runaway" are gone.

It's an end to Corporate control over the DJs and rack-jobbers too. Now anyone can get on the internet via CD Baby and others.

People can discover their own favorites, without having some indy promoter shoving the biggest payola paying artist down our throats.

Bully for the future.

so tired of the record-companies-are-the-devil argument. yes, cds were overpriced, but they enabled niche music (say, for example, Peter Gabriel's Real World label, or punk, or electronic, or left-handed zither music) to make money on smaller per-unit sales

the real problem is: people are stealing music. and they are walking out not just with a record or two, but the whole store.

anybody here actually talked personally to teenagers? ask them how much music they've bought recently. then ask how much they've downloaded. only 3% of songs on an iPod are purchased from iTunes (22 songs out of 1000)... and iTunes is something like 90% of the digital sales market... you get the idea.

worse, teens are growing up with the belief that music should be free... (but won't argue that, say, health-care should be free.) people should understand that music has real-world value and that by buying music, they will enable more music to be made. (duh.)

the equally tired argument then comes up from people saying "they get my money anyway, I bought the band t-shirt..." to justify their theft. what they are really saying is that the merchandise (keychain, doll) has more significance in their lives than the music... and of course, the next step is you'll get free music on your phone... ("free" being, watch 100,000+ ads and let us collect and sell intimate data about you)

Shinjuku Zulu
http://www.myspace.com/shinjukuzulu

Albums make sense in the classical world of music, but in the song world, it makes much more sense to buy by the song. Most folk music (I mean this in the general sense which would include pop, rap, rock and roll, country, blues, americana, hip hop, etc.) albums contain songs without any connection between them other than that they're all songs. When forced to buy cds, the listener is usually purchasing a few well written songs and lots of filler. There have been occasional attempts by some of the better writers to write specifically for the collection with a single lyrical or musical theme running through the album, usually with mixed results. The notables here are The Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper," Dylan's "John Wesley Harding," "Nashville Skyline," "Blood On The Tracks," and the converted Christian album, Willie Nelson's "Phases and Stages," "The Red Headed Stranger," and "Stardust," and several efforts by Randy Newman and Van Dyke Parks. Given the ephemeral nature of song popularity, it's ironic that the music business is always slow to change the way they do business. The good side to downloading vs buying cds is that there will be less expense for extraneous musical accompaniment and more emphasis on the actual quality of a given song. The regressive music industry will fight to preserve what is already dead instead of thinking outside the box to make themselves relevant, but each year that passes the industry suffers. No one cares about their fate as they seem to always overlook quality over buzz. They'll survive because they'll eventually figure out how to market product, but as they resist changes, they will continue to slide downward for awhile. Bye, bye Miss American Pie.

Some people seem to be misinterpreting the point of this article. It's not that teens won't pay for music -- they're not buying CDs. They'll pay for downloads, though. (It does change the game for musicians, though, in that the format of the LP, the idea of a cohesive group of songs, has reverted back to a singles market, a la the 50s and 60s.) And kids don't fetishize albums they way we used to in decades past; jewel cases and discs are just clutter.

Better technology, smaller footprint. The kids are getting smart. Industry will follow.

Quality music will always sell. No one should be surprised that consumers of any age won't shell out $15-$20 on lousy music.

I really enjoyed Mark Farina's Live CD and lil' Lois Vega's new one this year- but pop music simply sucks ass today. Why buy an album when you can hear the exact same some for free in a COke commercial?

I stopped listening to music years ago until apple allowed me the choice to choose singles. If an album is good it will sell and I will buy it. Now I'm listening to music all the time and enjoying my choices which are in majority singles.