I'm pleased to see that people care enough about this issue to post so many thoughtful opinions about it.   It irritates me that the music industry is so profit-focused. It would seem to me that whether you buy the commercially printed CD, or use an online digital music subscription service, the artist is still getting the short end of the money stick. Free file-sharing is out of the question as far as I'm concerned, because I don't want to be sued and, aside from publicity for lesser-known artists, there's not much benefit to anyone other than the person who gets the free music file. Short of contacting various artists directly and sending them a personal check for copies of their music, I don't really know what we could do to change this mess. In the meantime, I think a nice compromise is to use a subscription based online service to find, preview and burn copies of certain tracks that you just want individually (Rhapsody has the lowest per-track cost at 79 cents - http://www.bestbuy.com/rhapsody) and then go to the store and buy the commercial CD for artists who you really want to support or that consistently put out great CDs.