Despite the negative press, mp3 is surely a great thing for music as an art form. With a few mouse clicks listeners can now check out a great new local band on Myspace, listen to the artists that influenced them, buy their music, send the tracks to their friends. In bypassing the traditional financial hurdle of physical distribution costs, mp3 has heralded a potentially more meritocratic age in music.

A far greater problem, in my opinion, is the labels themselves: signing celebrities who can't sing and sending them into a studio for 2 weeks to record songs even the songwriter doesn't like, that are then tweaked out of all recogntion by an under-paid producer with Autotune. They sound bad when they're mp3'd because they sounded bad in the first place!