the music industry are rather selfish to be taking such drastic action, it's not as if the industry is collapsing as a result of this.
reminds me of the metallica drummer, Lars Ulrich who shut down Napster and became....well, a very much hated guy by many napster users.
Music download programs open the field of availablity of music to millions of fans and people may stumble into music that they never heard before and find that they love it, then go out and buy that groups CD's. Music download programs are a fail-safe to wasting money on music you don't like. Say a person walks into a music store and sees a CD that got mixed reviews. They can go home and download a couple songs to see if they like it or not. If they don't, they saved their money, if they do, they go back and buy something that they know they'll like instead of not taking a chance on something they don't know much about.
You may say, "Yeah, but why spend money when you can download the whole CD", but I think you'd be surprised by how many people who go buy the CD, I know I do. Music download programs just get the bad wrap for the people that download entire albums, but that is a minority to the casual music downloaders. I know many people that buy a band's CD after downloading a couple songs, and I personally hate burned CDs and have nothing but the actual, printed versions.
I only download songs if they are a random assortment that I'm putting together (like a 70's mix or something like VH1's recent greatest songs list). Otherwise I buy the CD. Besides, you look like such a cheap ass when you show people your CD "collection" that consists of purely burned CD's.