Alright, its late, I should go to sleep, or at least be doing something productive, but this is starting to piss me off, so this is what I've got to say:
Legal online music sales will never really take off, cover the losses being experienced as customers buy fewer and fewer CD's, or lure people away from free downloads on file sharing networks until songs are reasonably priced. 99 cents a song is too much. 50 cents a song is too much. Hell, 25 cents a song is arguably too much. Why? Two reasons.
First, check this logic out: the average CD has, say, 16 or seventeen tracks. That same CD sells for about 10-20 dollars, depending. That makes each track worth about 50-99 cents each. Included in that price is the cost of producing the CD, shipping it, putting it on the floor, advertising it through the store, and selling it to the customer with a cashier. None of these costs are present in an mp3 downloaded online. Unless there's some logic or facts that I'm missing, that means you'll never convince me to pay 99 cents for an mp3. Period.
Second, consider what you're getting when you 'own' a piece of music, be it as an mp3, on a CD, on a record, or an 8-track. What you have is a copy of a song being performed by the artist. You do not have the artist in front of you. The copy will always sound the same, aside from wear and tear on the physical medium if its not an mp3, no matter how many times you play it. And there are, in effect, an infinite number of copies of that same recording running around the world. In short, you paid for something that is almost completely un-unique. Perhaps more importantly, as I understand it anyway, the artist didn't see hardly any of the money that you paid. Most of it went to the label. So what's the point of paying a lot of money for a copy of what is in effect the stereotypical version of a song, especially when the artist hardly benefits? If I'm going to pay money for music, I'm much more willing to do it when its to see the artist live, to hear a new and original version of the song that I like, and when I know the artist is getting most of the money.
The bottom line seems to be that the whole system of record labels itself is now an arcane system. You signed up with a label because they had the infrastructure to produce a recording of your songs so that people would hear them so they'd come to your concerts. Now, the ability to literally produce your own music in a garage and distribute it over the internet practically for free makes the record label obsolete, or close enough anyway.
Seems that the record labels would much rather sue everyone they can get their hands on, rather than face up to this impending reality. And that pisses me off, because I just don't see it as piracy.
How can you steal something of which there are an infinite number of identical copies?