That is why 6 Music is so good.

That is a well thought out and written piece of work

Just using my own circumstances

SWMBO loves music (even modern stuff but....). Anyway she used to buy CD’s on a reasonably regular basis.
Now that he has a ipod ( and recently got an iphone) she downloads the songs she is interested in and not buy the whole album

She is (now I have shown her how) in the process of ripping all of her CD’s into iTunes – illegal in the UK I know but.....

Anyway she has gone from buying a couple of CD’s a month to say 4 or so singles

I must confess I'm a diehard CD buyer. I'll use things like Spotify to audition stuff but the adverts drive me mental for regular listening. In addition, I really cannot abide almost anything played on the radio, at least outside of Radios 3 and 4.

Sound quality is something else that really bugs me, in that MP3s do sound considerably worse than FLAC, even at nominally the same equivalent standard. I have music in MP3 and FLAC format on my computer and the difference is noticeable between the two.

I think that they should legalise ripping CD's as long as you still retain the disks. I may have an extensive iTunes folder with more than 26000 tracks but they come 99% from the CD's that I still own. I will admit to downloading the odd track because it is not available on CD in the UK normally. If they allowed that, would piracy even be a problem? I still have the CD but have format shifted it to a more portable format for my purposes.

I didn't realise it was illegal to rip CDs in the UK. Oops.

mp3s are the death of quality music production and have become accepted like so many "dumbing down" type things by the yoof. For crappy chart music, a 320 mp3 will be ok. Even for a lot of the deep and soulful house I love so much. But for real music, it has to be FLAC or better. The difference is night and day on anything above cheap computer speakers.

Technically it is just copyright infringement, though if you rip the CD's and sell them then really you should delete the ripped tracks. Though that rarely happens.

I agree, and that's why the industry has nobody to blame but itself for falling sales - many people aren't buying CDs the way they used to because they got out of the habit years ago, when the mainstream became a no-go area for them

That might have been long enough to kill off many music stores.