Providing music so cheaply as to make piracy just too much of a bother.

For the last couple years I have been thinking something along these lines is the only legal music distribution model that could work at this point. Get rid of the concept of purchasing music and simply do music on demand for a minimal monthly fee. Of course this presupposes sufficient, ubiquitous, wireless bandwidth so that nobody needs a physical copy of the music. Take a device the size of an iPod and replace the hard drive with a WiFi or 3G radio and a slick search interface similar to the empegs and let everyone have access to every song ever recorded for $5-$10 a month. Allow creation of flexible playlists so you could still create your music library, but without storing the actual files on the device. The technology is getting close, but the traditional music distribution model needs to die first.

-Mike