Although I do battle with Rhapsody's software when I reflash a rom to my Pocket PC, I think DRM is a good idea. The 2 reasons I have for this are:

1. Artists make the music utilizing the recording, marketing, production, and distribution arms of the record companies. The artist and the record company should be paid for the intellectual property (the music) and the service (the record company machinery) they provide. That is not to say that all of the service provided is valuable, just that there is non-zero cost in bringing the music to market.

2. DRM enables subscription services like Rhapsody which would be near impossible in a DRM-free world. There are many albums for which I would never shell out $16 in the store or $0.99/song on iTunes. But I would like to listen to them for a while (and more than 30 seconds worth).

The problems that I see with DRM as it is today are that Apple has their own standard that they use with iTunes while everyone else uses Microsoft's DRM, and that getting DRM to recognize a legitimate copy activity (e.g. from my desktop to my pocket pc) vs an illegitimate activity (e.g. from my desktop to my buddy's).

The first problem could be solved with a 3rd-party standard, but neither Apple nor MS would go for that. Another way would be for Apple to support MS DRM in iTunes and on the iPod or license their DRM to other device manufacturers. Unfortunately, Apple has a huge incentive to avoid doing this to make sure that once someone buys an iPod and signs up for iTunes it'll be painful to switch to a different device or service.

Of course, any DRM system will eventually be cracked, but you just want the bar high enough so that there is a non-zero barrier to pirating music. In the 80s, I could copy audio tapes off my friends, but I wouldn't copy 10,000 songs because of the cost of purchasing blank audio tapes.

Not to nitpick, (well actually, to nitpick) kerosene won't burn in the presence of a spark or an open flame even if it atomizes unless there is oxygen present. Atomization generally refers to the dispersion (though not as a solution) of a liquid in air (which is fortunately 21% oxygen) so it's not too far off base.

However the space directly above a pool of kerosene has kerosene which is not atomized (like a mist), but kerosene vapor in a gaseoues solution (genuinely molecularly dispersed and much more reactive than something which is atomized) with air. Like all flamable compounds there is a lower and higher explosion limit for the concentration of the flamable compound (for example, 4% hydrogen in nitrogen is considered a non-flammable gas and cyliners of 4% hydrogen utilize a non-flamable CGA-580 fitting). Once you mix the air and kerosene in the right proportions, then it becomes flamable - not merely because it is atomized. The atomization (or vaporization) changes how quickly the mixture burns, not whether or not is inherently flammable. If you atomized or even completely vaporized kerosene in pure nitrogen and applied a spark it would not burn.

Still, there's stuff I don't get. How are the very same labels that bitched and moaned about Apple's refusal to price anything above 99 cents with DRM restrictions going to be willing to let Amazon sell their stuff for ten cents cheaper and without restrictions? I guess it's already happened with the first two that signed on, but I'm suspicious that some agreement is in place whereby Amazon agrees to jack up the price after a certain amount of time. I guess we'll see.

There's nothing mysterious about this. I'm pretty sure that answer is that Apple wishes to make more per sale than Amazon or Rhapsody or Napster. It seems much more likely that record companies have a fixed rate at which they sell songs and that Apple's markup from the wholesale price they pay for the song is $0.10 more than Amazon and others. The record companies could care less about the retail price, they only receive payment for the wholesale price. In fact, the lower the margin, the lower the retail price, and more sales for which the record companies receive the same wholesale price.

That would also explain Apple's claims that record companies won't let them sell songs for less. The consumer only sees the retail price, not the breakdown of wholesale price and margin. Lowering either one would lower prices and increase sales, so Apple can claim that the record companies won't let them sell songs for less than $0.99, but what they are really saying is that they aren't willing to reduce their margin so any cost reduction has to come from the wholesale price. The record companies aren't going to be willing to let Apple pocket a higher percentage of the retail price than their current arrangement.

Kinda like a Wal-Mart type of squeeze on the manufacturers - we want to lower our prices but not our margins so you should lower your wholesale prices.

Of course this strategy of blaming the supplier for your high prices doesn't work once real competition springs up and offers the same product with a lower margin.

What I don't understand is why the record companies don't get into this business and put everyone else out of business by charging $0.30/song or whatever the wholesale price is. The only guess I can make is that people don't want to have to go to several different sites to compile their music collection.