First and foremost, I don't want to flame anyone (and my reply is not intended to be a flame).

In reply to:

If I like a song I don't want to have to go out and buy the whole cd when all I want is the 1 song.

I agree with you to some degree that the ethics of the music industry are questionable. I find it very painful to purchase a CD and find that only one song on that CD is any good. So I do see where you are coming from.

However, as citezens in a captalist society, this opinion of ethics does not give us the right to violate law.

When you buy a CD, you are not buying the music. You are buying a RIGHT to listen to that music whenever, wherever and however you want (special exceptions apply as some will debate the however part I'm sure ). You have no right to listen to downloaded music you didn't pay for, even if you hate the only CD that it is available on.

In reply to:

If there were some way I could pay for my mp3's I would

You may be thinking that the cost of a song on a CD should be the total cost of the CD divided by the number of songs on the CD (so, for example, 12 songs on a $10 CD would be 83 cents a CD). That's not the way it works.

Even if you could by the songs separately, you wouldn't get them for as cheap as you think:

Often times I have seen that a "single" song on a CD is half the cost of the full 12 track CD. Production costs aside, the cost of each song is not equal in the eyes of the artist. The cost of a full CD is often times made up in 2 or 3 songs out of 12. The artist doesn't expect you to like them all. The artist expects to get paid for the 2 or 3 songs you enjoy (and the cost of the CD is arguably based around that... I still say it's more expensive than what it's worth personally). Meanwhile, the customer thinks he's getting ripped off because the customer thinks the artist is charging $10 for all 12 songs.

The fact remains that you have no right to listen freely to the artist's song without buying the license for the CD.

So, pay the full price for the CD (of which most of it is what the artist would cosider the value of the "good" songs) and the beauty of MP3 technology is that you only have to encode that one song and then put the CD away. Then you don't have to listen to the shitty songs you don't like. But at least you paid for the right to listen to it.

Kureg