[Perndog]

It's true that the volume of files shared is huge, but I have seen some pretty impressive collections of copied CDs - I'm not sure about young adults, but in high school, almost every person whose collection I saw had many more burned copies than originals, and several people owned several hundred copied CDs and only a couple dozen they had paid for. This includes all of the amateur DJs that worked at dances in the area, and I would have turned them in if they weren't my friends - I already disagree with copying CDs, and these guys were profiting from stolen music.

The other difference we haven't covered is that unless you own an mp3 or mp3 CD player (though they are getting more prevalent), you'll only be listening to your collection at your computer, so most of us want to carry CDs around anyway, and the place people listen to music most often (or so it seems to me) is in their cars, and since not many of us have mp3 players in our cars, CDs are still the way to go. And, again from talking to the people in high school with the huge burned collections (feel free to correct me if adults are different - my friends right now all pretty much agree with me on this issue so I don't know the other side of the story), far more burned CDs are direct copies rather than collections of downloaded files.

Finally, a lot of us buy albums after we download songs from them. When you copy a record, though, you won't have any incentive to buy it unless you really want the original packaging, in which case you would have bought it whether or not you copied it.