Man oh man, this chart/graph/circle of goodness makes me tingle a bit. Welcome to your first circuit lesson. This is what Electrical Engineering looks like.

I love music; all types of music. I enjoyed the guitar growing up as well as middle school, high school and college marching and concert bands. I have a high appreciation for music.

That said, I think that the RIAA and record companies need to relax on simply suing "file sharers" and evolve their business model to fit new technology that they think can only harm them. A good solution to this is music subscriptions via cell phones.

Why not? The days are numbered where we have to pay "per minute" for calls. The bandwidth (amount of the internet needed) to make a voice phone calls is 100x smaller than videos and 10x smaller than music. Why give "unlimited" internet access, which could be in the 100s of MB for 1 price, yet keep charging for voice and text messages. A simple voice call is 10x larger than a text message. See what's going on here? Check out this link that shows 1MB of texting costs $1,310. This is OUTRAGEOUS!!!

Think about this; and average song is around 4MB, and can be streamed at any time from pandora.com. Say you listen to 10 songs a day, I personally listen to around 50-75. Your 10 songs a day, if priced the same as text msgs, would cost $13,100!!! Video is MUCH larger....but I digress...

Cell phone companies are really the only people that currently have Internet accessible virtually everywhere in the US. It's a fact that people enjoy listening to music on the go, and there are already applications, Pandora, Napster, iTunes, that allow you to take your music along, but most of these require you to connect your phone to your computer to acquire songs. Why not have something like "Napster-to-go" on your cell phone and listen to basically anything you want at any time. Incorporate Bittorrent so that no single person has to host all the songs all the time. Each bittorrent user could have a collection of songs saved to their phone (phones need more harddrive space firstly), and can "seed" music to others that have similar tastes. I don't need to BUY or OWN my music if I don't want to. I can simply rent it. THis is where the Telecom companies need to step in.

With so many people listening to so much different music, I am bound to find someone with my song, otherwise it would be up to the company providing the music to get it "out there" so that people can continue to share it. All of this would be legal because the phone companies would offer packages that include music streaming. The prices would eventually come down (which is what happens in EVERY area of the economy except when the Government is involved) and every one that has a cell phone can listen to all the music he/she wants without having to worry about buying each song, or illegally downloading it when they can't afford $1/song. This needs to be a network-free service so that all people on all cell phone carriers can participate and make it work. Remember that file sharing is a two way street.

This scheme would help the pitiful, complaining Music industry, help the artists get their name out (look at what Pandora has already done for bands everywhere), help the Telcom industries with possible lawsuits from the RIAA, helps Telcom industries by giving them another "package" to sell and attract customers, and lastly, and most importantly it helps the consumer by giving more choice and freedom with their music. Businesses are dependent on US THE CONSUMER, and we do not need them. They require our dollars to survive, yet we do not need music (or any other service good) to survive.

...or they can just keep suing people for $1M/song and see where that gets them.

-Desh