Hmm. I somewhat agree and I understand your argument, but the sucess of an album and the songs on it are very hard to predict. No one knows which songs will be hits or popular singles, especially the RIAA.

If you are talking about the expectation that there will be a certain amount of popular songs on an album, and saying that they figure the prices based on that, I don't think that is true either. If the songs on an album were sold individually, sure there would be certain songs on the album that no one would buy and I understand how that would suck for the artist, but in the end, they might make more that way. Who knows, it might even result in a sort of learning experience for the artist. They can judge what people like and aim their music in that direction (although that isn't the best way of making music).

The fact remains that all this is going to have to be considered by the RIAA. They absolutely cannot leave this alone, and there's nothing they can do to stop the use of MP3's.

ps-I can see it now: "we'll just start recording everything in wma format!" yeah, we'll fall for that.

DiGNAN