I, for one, would much rather buy the two songs I like from an album, instead of the whole CD. Especially if the CD is copy protected and I have to waste time transfering the songs on my PDA and PC.

Of course they'd have to be of high quality, and I should be able to play the songs on other devices as well besides my PC. I'm not a great fan of Windows Media, though.. How about FLAC or SHN? =)

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A little note on a recent experience with current copyprotection mechanisms:

I recently aquired Blur´s newest album which is copy protected. I wanted to record the album to a minidisc, something that should be perfectly legal. This didn´t work and the disc was filled with track marks until it became full (255 trackmarks if I´m not mistaken).

However, when I copied the CD with Nero (without any problems whatsoever) I could record the copy to minidisc.

Great job on the copy protection, it restricts the consumer to using only CD players but it´s perfectly possible to make copies of the disc.

That's the problem with copyprotections - they cause more problems to legitimate users than to pirates. They're an annoyance more than anything else.

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I'm not to sure about Microsoft's version of the iTunes service for a few reasons:

It requires Windows Media Player 9 - Some people I know will not even install this!

Tracks will likely be encoded in WMA9 - All the artefact problems with previous versions of WMA will put some off. Even WMA9 can't cope very well with voices in Stereo, e.g. Billy Joel.

It's quite unlikely that CD burning will be allowed. iTunes may have succeeded so well as its users were not restricted on what they could do with their tracks - If you can burn them to CD, you can rip them back off into MP3s, etc. for MP3 players, e.g. RIO, Goodmans CD-MP3 player, etc.. ;-)

I just do not see the point,,,,,,,,,,,,:) it is a microsof product ,,,if you have a ps2 try the q-cast

It's crap... 32kbps encoded songs that sound like AM radio station...
The same service exists in Belgium via an ISP, it's another name, but same plateform and titles behind. MSN is just using service provider... like that belgian ISP...

Well... it's streaming that's in 32kbps. When you download it's 128kbps.Streaming should also be in 128kbps.