I just saw this article talking about how the "age of illegal music sharing" is ending. Which is laughably incorrect.

It's impossible to implement copy protection on music. If you can play it and listen to it, you can rerecord it. Not that you need to. Using a proxy on something like Grooveshark meant you could save and download the raw MP3s with no quality loss from conversion or recoding.

Having said that, what I suspect may happen at some point is that music distributors will team up with computer, tablet and phone OS developers and make it impossible to play music without (a) an internet connection and (b) authenticating against a service which checks whether you've bought it or not.

What they've been reluctant to do so far is to pass on the savings from (a) electronic distribution (b) reduction of piracy. I think £1 per song is extortionate. A song can be written in under a week and recorded at minimal cost. Compare it to a film which may take hundreds of people an entire year and hundreds of millions of dollars to produce (and is 90 minutes of sound and vision, as opposed to three minutes of sound).