I want the physical disc, the higher sound quality, the album art, the lyrics, and the knowledge that what I have paid for is permanent. I also don't use credit cards, so that leaves me, as well as millions of others, particularly younger people who are music's bread and butter, out of the market for purchased downloads of music. Sony has led the way by manufacturing portable MP3 players, with the philosophy that if people are going to download Sony's MP3s, they might as well buy a Sony product to play them on. SACD, by all reports, will put the CD as we know it to shame. Although this will create higher hurdles for piracy, the hard, cold fact is that as long as music is encoded in zeroes and ones, somebody will find a way to copy it.
Music sales are higher than ever.
Concert tours are also doing well. People even seem more interested in music than they have been in a long time. Those people are also buying Eminem's concert tickets and merchandise at the concerts. This is evidence that sharing music is effective advertising for artists. No matter what happens in the war over Napster, the fact remains that the MP3 format isn t going away.