I think the best solution is to sell CD quality music, i.e. lossless formats such as FLAC over the internet per song and then crack down like the KGB on pirates so that it really makes it not worth it to steal music. Selling individual songs would make artists create better music since most albums these days only have maybe one good song and then a bunch of crap. If you liked the entire album then maybe you could purchase it at a discount price. Have individual songs cost $1 and maybe an lbum that has 15 songs cost $10. The question then comes to who can sell the music or how do you charge for music downloads say on a peer to peer network.

Of course this won't solve the problem of finding smaller unkown artists versus financially backed artists of the RIAA and their brand of canned teenie pop music.

I think the real question that needs be asked is how can we as music fans find a better way to listen to the unknown music that we love?