Jack,

Excellently written posting. I didn't want to get into this whole Napster thing again but I do want you to consider some other issues it raises.

Where do you buy your CD's from?
In your posting you gave the examples of sales figures from NSYNC and BRITNEY in the US. Absolutely phenomenal figures, but over here in the UK it's a different matter altogether. Although the industry over here is talking sales up the fact is that traditional specialist music retailers are under threat due to heavy discounting of chart product (NSYNC, BRITNEY etc.) in non-traditional outlets like supermarkets etc. AND the electronic retailers popping up on the net every five minutes. Add to these problems the ability for people to get the product ('coz that's what it is, 'product' ) for FREE of the net via Napster etc. and you can see the problems we are facing. So my company is about to adapt to the changes in the market by REMOVING ALL BACK CATALOGUE MUSIC FROM ALL IT'S STORES!. That's right. What's the point of having all this music available for people to browse through and puchase there and then when people are clearly happy to wait 4/5/ days for it to appear in their mail box? Radical? Maybe but in order to survive the bosses have decided (rightly or wrongly) to take these steps to keep the company alive. There are already strong rumours that another high street music chain will be in trouble before the end of the year.

So my point is that the jobs and livlihoods of thousands of people like myself who have made music and the love of it our lives work ARE AT RISK. Ultimately, direct downloading of music will put out of business all the people who have kept this scene alive including the mail order guys. Note also that one of your repliers says that he can now get his hands on the entire Z catalogue that he couldn't get before.
Bad news for all of Z's artists then. (That's Algers fault though for not sorting his distribution out)

I don't want to go on for ages but this 4000% figure. Just where did that come from?
A CD costing us £10.21 goes out at £15.99 (£16.49 in some other stores), but if it's a CHART CD like BRITNEY it could be discounted to as little as £10.99. Now take out the overheads of running a store of six staff, wages, heating, lighting etc. and that's a hell of a lot of CD's you've got to sell to make money. And we did used to but it's just not the same as it was.

Finally I just want to say that I support the use of any software that allows fans to obtain rare and deleted product otherwise unavailable. I love the net and think it's another useful tool in marketing music across the world but something is going to happen to protect artists recorded output and I suspect it will be the encoding of all CD's at source preventing them from being recorded AT ALL.

Now look what Napter's started.