I think it's done nothing useful, honestly. Casual downloading, as opposed to going to the record store and buying a CD, is too easy. It breeds apathy.

Perhaps, but at the same time, CDs have been largely replaced by iPods and you can't get a download for your iPod at a record store. If the music industry got out of bed with iTunes, the fallout would be *much* worse now. It wouldn't send music listeners back to retail stores, instead it would cause illegal firesharing to skyrocket because people aren't going to go back to CDs and disc mans.

So (in other words) Apple has almost singlehandedly destroyed the music industry with their gadgets and apps. You could be right about people not going back to discmans, but tracks can be yanked off of CD and put onto an iPod. To me it's a question of quality over quickness. CD quality is much better than MP3.