[Blackjack]

Hey hey, mind if we dispense with the Star Trek crap for a moment and talk about reality?

Record companies are making more money selling chart ringtones than the actual music. This makes me think that soon, they'll just give up trying to sell singles, and just give the damn thing away. All the money will be recouped on live perfomances, merchandising, or sidelines like the ubiquitous ringtones, not to mention money made on videos such as via text voting on the music TV channels.

I agree with FS, actually owning the CD/DVD/game or whatever gives me more pleasure and satisfaction than getting it online. Two years ago I bought the original Half-life bundled with CS, OpForce and BlueShift for around $20 and had more fun playing it than my burned copy back in 1999.

Besides, downloaded stuff is a pain in the ass - low quality, bits missing and what have you. I do a lot of DJing and whenever I play a track from one of the few burned compilations, my finger always hovers over the mixer with the next track lined up just in case of an embarrassing technical fault. Plus, I'm quite fussy with sound quality and when played over a reasonable system you can really can hear the Mp3 "artifacts" - and reduced low end.

Remember kids - Home taping is killing music.