...is c***. Al you have to do to defeat it is use a password protected .rar a file with extra material in it and no filter will ever catch it.

and lets not forget all of the false positives of legal files it will catch.

I still believe that one of the s best ways to battle piracy is making a quality file (without DRM) readily available for a fair price.

I have had to resort to file sharing when I could not purchase a song online, which is still the case for many songs / albums / artists.

I always thought that DRM free music easily accessible and inexpensive (maybe $.50 - $.75 a song, $5 an album) BUT a lot of people who went to the radiohead site to download In Rainbows ended up paying nothing (other than the handling fee). I believe the number was 40%-50% or so. I was disappointed to hear this. I was hoping people would pay something.

There are two ways to do this: the Soviet (or North Korean) way, or the open way. The soviet model: prohibit foreign movies, books, magazines, severely punish those who read, watch, distribute or even talk about anything foreign, in order to preserve your system. People will try to escape your system in order to access the stuff they want. The open way: give people open access to what they want. Some (few) will still want to escape, but most others will stay.

Perhaps the metaphor is a bit stretched, but the point is, only simple easy and unburdened legal download solution(s) will sway vast majority of current pirates over to the legal side.

There are many in the developed world who CAN afford downloads, but find few solutions. If someone tried to do a comparative study between the countries where iTunes store operates and those where there isn't one, and compare trends since before iTunes opened, I wouldn't be surprised if very clear trends emerged from such a study.

If you let them buy it cheap, they won't bother with the (still somewhat convoluted) effort to steal it.

The Radiohead experiment was very indicative. It proved that there would be a large number of people who are ready to pay. The study mentioned in the article above mentions 20:1 ratio. Radiohead experiment proves that the ratio might be closer to 2:1 (for every paid download, two went for free). Further study of Radiohead's web logs would probably demonstrate that those free downloads went to countries with poor legal download framework, where the piracy awareness is generally low. In the end, the experiment only proved that people are generally willing to pay when given a choice.

Drop the price of CDs, I stopped buying CDs because they cost to much.

the problem is there is a whole industry whose entire infrastructure is predicated upon being financed by CD sales at ridiculous prices. Until the recording industry reshapes itself so that it does not demand these kinds of prices to sustain itself, the music industry majors will continue to insist on getting paid way more than their product is worth, and piracy will go on unabated.

After all, how much of that money actually filters down to the artists? Ha!

Once upon a time, single songs (okay, with B sides) were available dirt cheap for everybody on 45rpm records. It's their own damn fault that they got greedy and insisted that everyone buy full albums on CDs. Even the so-called CD singles cost something like $5. Absolutely insane. On top of that, there's no new music I like anyway. Goodbye, music industry. I won't miss you.

Where are you getting your numbers for the 2:1 ratio? Radiohead declined to give any details on how much they sold or what people paid.

However, I don't think it's disappointing to count all those who paid nothing. Not having tried to download the album, I don't know how it was set up. But you want answers to bigger questions:

1) How many people who downloaded the album and paid little to nothing still have the album (i.e. liked the album).

2) How many people who downloaded the album for free came back after they liked what they heard and paid for it (try before you buy - much better then trying to figure something out on 30 second clips of songs).