The one thing that seems to get overlooked in all this discussion is Quality.

Take a music CD you bought at the store. Now download the .mp3 version of those songs. Now listen and compare.

Your download doesn't even get close to CD quality (unless you have real crappy speakers) till you get up into the higher bitrates (256 and 320).

So why pay $0.99 cents for inferior quality?? What a good scam for the recording industry. Music is like software. You make the product once and sell it many, many times... over and over again. And then you find out you can eliminate the ongoing cost of blank CDs and recording costs with the costs of some computer servers. Sure, they cost money and so does maintaining them--but folks, they could use the same old server software forever (Debian GNU Linux for FREE) and never incur an upgrade cost.

What you think you get here for FREE is really inferior quality. If you like the music, invest in the CD--don't waste your money paying for inferior downloads.

That's my opinion, anyway.