If two people agree on everything, one of them is unnecessary (in the discussion, I mean, not in life).

I think the only way the music industry can get behind online distribution of music is if there is a way to prevent somebody copying a song the second time. What's the use of charging for downloading a song from sony.com when the downloader can turn around and email it to 50 friends? I think it is possible, however, if the big music bucks would put a lot of $$$ behind researching a system of encoding which is vastly superior to anything we have now, but which disallows secondary copying (however that might work). People would buy the music because it sounds so much better than an mp3.

What's sad is that there is SO much stuff which is out of print, and not very likely to come back into print (e.g. they've done a CD of "greatest hits" of Allan Sherman, but have not brought out all of his albums; or has anybody ever seen more than one CD of Biff Rose?). THESE things, which the music industry isn't making any money on anyway, they could easily slap onto mp3 or some other electronic format and sell on the web, and those of us who are more interested in good music than new music would probably pay for the privilege of downloading it. I know I would.

Alex