In reply to:

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Do you know of any band that would want to share a CD with 1000 other groups? I don't think so.

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But you're thinking of the CD as the product.

Think of it as nothing more than a distribution medium and you'll see (well, I can anyway) that every artist* signed to a record company will want their songs on that collection.

By getting their songs out there into everybody's houses, all they then rely on is advertising and word of mouth to make the sales. If buying a song/album/sleeve artwork/other goodies is as quick as clicking a button on a web site (and it will be, because all you're doing is enabling/decrypting a product you already have), then I can't see how any sensible artist would object.

Of course, the record companies would never go for it. We've seen what's happened with DVDs and DeCSS - the record companies would be terrified of giving out a CD ROM/DVD ROM/Whatever with 10,000 tracks on it, just in case somebody figured out a way to enable/decrypt/whatever all of them.

Nick.

* OK, the artists with egos will probably complain, but that's a very small minority.

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