stoned employees AND big chains like best buy and walmart with their deep discounts could sell music on a 20% margin, then the only conclusion is that the iTunes store is incredibly wasteful and inefficient way to do business. I don't think that is the case. I think that selling music as mp3 downloads from Apple/Amazon servers has to be more efficient than shipping thousands of breakable CDs all over the world. So I think what has happened is that over the years that 30% margin has become parasitic . Parasitic in an economic sense meaning it's not really justified by the value it's adding. The 30% is simply the result of iTunes/Amazon being more of a bottleneck or gatekeeper. The fact that sites like www.bandcamp.com and www.cdbaby.com can do the same job on a lower margin suggests that the 30% is artificially high. I know the Apple-can-do-no-wrong crowd is sharping their knives right now. But hear me out. If the market lets Apple take 30% they should take 30%. The part of me that is an Apple shareholder applauds this action. And Apple should continue to charge this margin until it is forced to lower it by it's suppliers or competitors.Until apple really has some reasonable competition, until the music conglomerates figure out it's in their interest to license new online stores, create other competitors cheaply and efficiently, iTunes is not gonna have any competition. And as iTunes sales grow and physical sales shrink, Apple's market share is only