Apple has the largest, most successful online music store. They are fighting hard to keep the price of songs at $0.99. Steve Jobs responded to RIAA whining that the prices are to low by calling the music industry "greedy." Which of course they are. Think of it this way: The label's have 0 overhead in this model. They simply provide the tunes in digital format. Apple of course has a datacenter for storage and the web store, probably co-located with their main website. I don't know what their take is but I would imagine it to be much less per-song than traditional distribution channels. So 99-cents per song and about a 12-15 song-per-album average and you're talking the same amount per album but lower overhead. And the RIAA folks want to charge more. @#$@ bastards. Anyhoo if you and/or your son have a bunch of CD's you can use iTunes to rip them to the computer and load them on the iPod. I don't think anyone else charges less per song. There is of course, ahem, "other" places to get the songs. Hypothetically speaking I would run such a program through a blind proxy in say Russia to avoid prying eyes. Hypothetically.
