Billed By The Byte > as long as there is no minimum....

reply to KoolMoe

Re: as long as there is no minimum....

Regarding piracy -- it would certainly curtail it but there are two things different now than in my youth that make piracy much more pervasive:

1) It's quick and incredibly easy to rip a CD.
2) Everyone has high speed connections to share files.

For the moment, let's assume 2 becomes expensive. We still haven't addressed 1.

In my youth we made 8-track (yes, I had a Radio Shack Realistic 8-track recorder!) and later cassette tapes of each others albums and 45rpm hit singles. Recording took place in real time. If you wanted to copy someones album, it took an hour to make the copy. There were some tape-to-tape decks that would copy at faster speeds but a tape copy of an album contains significantly degraded fidelity. At the very least, a tape-to-tape copy doubles the degradation. Bottom line -- it was a pain in the ass to share music.

Today even without high speed Internet connections, the digital age makes it quick and easy to copy music. With a thumb drive friends can share hundreds of albums with minimal hassle. It's even easier if the music is already in MP3 format because there's no rip time. Practically instant, perfect copies can be made.

reply to S_engineer

They wouldn't love it when all their online sales go "poof" because everything is now twice as expensive.