You're still thinking in terms of the old music distribution economics. Artists will not be selling a CD with 10 songs on it. Record companies will give out CDs with 100,000 songs on it for free. The costs associated with marketing 10,000 different albums, trucking out all these, mailing out all these, packaging all of these will simply go away. Also, the cost in materials will also go away. So basically, the record companies will advertise artists, or artists will advertise themselves, via tv, cable, satellite, internet web pages, whatever. The consumer when they want one particular song, will pay 15cents and they will get a permanant unlock code. And this unlock code might have the customer's personal IDs encoded in it, so the codes can't be distributed without the buyer being responsible.

When it comes down to it, artists currently are interested in distributing their music via mp3 on the web -- but still, this stuff is compressed and lossy! And what's more, if somebody wants to buy 10 uncompressed songs, are they willing to download 650 megabytes over a 56k link? forget about it! What if they just click to buy, select the songs, and recieve an unlock code for the songs they bought? It won't even be an unlock code for each song they buy, but one unlock code that gets updated for all the unlocked songs each time they buy. Anyway, back to the point: by giving these CDs out through physical distribution channels, it circumvents the lack of bandwidth that exists for most consumers. By buying a small unlock code on the net, they can download hundreds of gigabytes of music in less than a second.

There are many assumptions built into this, for example, if bandwidth increases significantly, then it would make just about any storage medium obsolete.

Calvin