"Jaimie Vernon" writes: > Interesting perspective. Let's see you apply that to gas stations, car > dealerships and auto insurance companies. Just "try" and tell them you won't > > pay their prices. Except a) those things are more necessities than music, so people can't as easily just decide not to buy, and b) there aren't tens of thousands of gas/auto/insurance providers willing to give you their product for nothing or next to nothing on their websites or myspace pages. If that happened you can bet the prices on all three would plummet dramatically. Music is being devalued because there are tens of thousands of musicians who apparently don't care about making any money. That's always been the case, it's just that before they couldn't easily control the means of production and distribution. Now they can. So you need to either get that competition to not give their product away, or make your product of such an intrinsic higher value that people are willing to pay a premium for it. People trying to sell music are not only on the bad end of a supply and demand situation (almost infinite supply), they are also handicapped by the fact that much of the supply is free. It's not as much the consumer that's killing you, it's your fellow musicians and their impact on the perceived value of music. Not so much a Wal-mart versus Mom & Pop store situation as a Free Beer versus Mom & Pop. And the situation will only get worse, since the technology just keeps making music easier to write/record/produce/encode/post/etc., etc. Will much of it be bad? Sure. Will it be hard to sort through for the good stuff? Sure. But pe ople are more willing to put up with that kind of thing when it's free. Mark ************************************** See what's free at http://www.aol.com.