[andygrif]

Well done for admitting your crime Kronas!! By the way to be recipricolly pedantic your nearest Virgin Megastore is less than 10 miles away!

Scastle, agree about Asia - there is a different mentality to piracy over there, like the endless counterfeit VCDs and now DVDs that stem from Hong Kong and the like.

I would also agree about pricing. I've said a lot that now that the cost of albums has dropped, people will buy less singles. Also with the Now and Hits series of albums, you're often getting new releases that way - which is a far cheaper way of getting your music. The record companies are partly to blme for this - they experienced less single sales, so looked to compiltions as a way of marketing their new releases. This means that people will be even less singles, and it becomes a vicious circle. You can get to No.1 in the singles chart with less than 30,000 sales now - that's 0.05% of the popultion buying a copy!

I have no idea why anyone would pay nearly 4 quid for a CD single. In my opinion singles should be releases with one song or several versions of one song (no more B sides) for 99p. This would stimulate the kids into buying more singles.

I also completely agree with you about peer to peer not being the only problem. They are putting more emphasis on it than I believe they should be - there is no doubt that organised music piracy, in the form of counterfeit goods, is far more serious in terms of monetary cost to the labels, but there are a lot more casual P2P downloaders, and they are easier to find than organised gangs that often operate in other countries.