[Bennett]

We must just have a completely different group of peers. Even those people I know who have a ton of burnt cds, only have a respective handful that are direct copies. Most are either still in the mp3 format (a lot of radios, dvd players, cd players etc now will recognize them... my friend's new truck recognizes mp3s and it's got a five disc changer filled with burnt cds of mp3s) or they have been transferred to the wav format-normal cd.

I've seen just the opposite of what you're describing. I've seen people download an entire album, download the cover art and the art on the cd, stamp the cd with a label that looks like the art, put the cover art in an empty jewel case, and voila!

It may just be like I said, we have a different group of peers. Looking at this thread, however, nobody has really mentioned how many "direct copies" they have as compared to shared files. They have mentioned that they only download stuff when they wouldn't want to buy the whole album. From this statement, it seems like if they wanted a whole album they would buy it rather than copy it.

The last time I did it, which was a while ago, ripping and burning songs from a group of cds was a MAJOR pain in the ass. Could you imagine swimming through the pile of cds it would take to amass 50 gigs of mp3s? Especially if you're only taking a few songs from an album you otherwise wouldn't buy.

That last statement is key in this discussion, I think. You now have the ability to say, "oh I don't want to buy that album, there's only one good song on it, and I can get that from Kazaa." Before, a person might be swayed to buy an album if they had heard one or two songs they liked. Whereas now, they know they can get it for free. Why bother if you don't want the whole album. Similarly, sales for singles is a shadow of what it used to be, you only have to go to the nearest record shop to see how tiny the singles sections have become. Who wants to pay five or six dollars for a cd single or 15 dollars for a cd with a couple good songs on it?