Personally I think that 99 cent is a rip off for a single mp3. Something around the 30 cent would seem more appropriate to me, considering I have to pay for the delivery costs ( phone bill ), and considering that I get no art work, no cd case. Also there are no costs to be recouped for the export of these cd's across the world, and nor to they have to pay employees to stock and sell these songs.

I agree completely, not to mention the inferior sound quality of MP3's as well. Also, that idea about the music stock exchange was really f**king dumb.

I think an interesting point was raised in the piece about record companies making more from downloads than from CDs. and yes, 99c is a ridiculous price for a single track.

Agreed about the idea of prices rising the more popular a song is., is a stupid idea..prices of music should be static, whether it be downloaded or physical CD's/Records. In Ireland anyway, I think the prices of CD's are too high, digital downloads, I don't bother with, yeah it's easy and you can pick the tracks and all that, but no artwork, no physical thing is in your hands. a fair price for per track downloading I think should be around the 50 cent mark, and per album basis, around 7-9Europes - anythig over that is plain greedy

I've been using this site http://www.mp3search.ru/ works out a euro for an album, good selection too....

There's a good article by Joel Spolsky on why the industry might want to charge different prices here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/11/18.html I don't know if 99c is a fair price to pay for a single track or not. What's the price of a single in shops these days?

What ever the price of the single in the shop, dont forget that that price includes the packaging, its transport to the country/shop, the heating/maintenance of the shop and the employees wages.. Very few of these variables are present when buying online. Granted, there are different variables, but these are not that significant considering the world wide market that is available to a seller of digital music online

I dunno. I think without numbers in front of you it's pretty hard to tell. Sure there is some saving in centralising customers but just how much is very hard to estimate.

Allofmp3.com only charge about about six cents a tune.

Are either of mp3search.ru or allofmp3.com legit though? As far as I can tell they sell bootlegs which would indicate they aren't.

You slightly messed up the link there: http://www.moskalyuk.com/blog/are-russian-music-sites-legal/422 It might be just about legal, but I wouldn't regard these sites as legitimate. More importantly you can't really compare these with the likes of iTunes as they don't have to negotiate with the record companies.

There was a big hullabaloo about these Russian sites a while back, something to do with copyright law barely existing in Russia.