said by N3OGH :

Way to Troll..

I'm so goddamn sick of how everything here deteriorates into partisan political bullshit.

When Napster first came out, did I download songs? Sure I did. My reasoning?

1: A lot of the songs I wanted (obscure 70's stuff) was not available in stores.

2: A lot of the stuff I wanted was on $20 CD's, and all I wanted was 1 song.

Let's face it, if you're not willing to pay .99 for a song you want, you're noting but a 2 bit thief. I've downloaded a lot of songs for .99 that I thought were crap, and ended up deleting. It's .99! people, GET A GRIP.

A short list of things that cost more than a buck...

A 16oz cup of coffee: $1.15

A 22oz Coca Cola $1.39

A gallon of gas $2.35

A lays "grab bag" of Doritos is a buck and a quarter around here for chirssake.

Let's face it, if you can afford 1: a broadband connection, 2: a computer that will facilitate the use of today's P2P networks, and 3: the CD burner to burn the CD's to export your illegally downloaded music to your CD player, you sure as HELL can afford to blow a dollar (a BUCK, .99C!!!!) on a song you might want...

said by rds24a :

There's two points of view on the whole $0.99 deal:

1. The parts cost more than the whole. Common practice...ever price out buying a car piece-by-piece from NAPA? Way more than the whole. However, It currently costs more to buy the whole online than a CD in the store.

2. The lack of distribution. No CD's, no shipping, etc. etc. There should be a price break for that, I agree. However, there is a premium on convenience and I'm not willing to argue that it should be $0.50 or $0.75 or $5.00 an album. I think $0.99 a song is OK...not great, but OK.

As for the file size/quality issue. I'm sure it's more a matter of Dances with Focus Groups trying to find some one file size that provides sufficient quality while reaching out to those lowly dialup users who still have to wait 20 minutes to download one 3 Mb song file. Perhaps the solution there is to offer a hi-fi and a not-so-hi-fi version, but I guarantee you there will be a price difference (for not much reason other than they can).