Music Downloads

I read an article this morning about the Record Industry wanting to increase the price of music downloads. This absolutely outrages me and I feel it is for good reason. I look at it this way, sure people used to buy CDs at about $15.99 - $20.99 / CD but this price was not astronomical. Looking at the process to create, distribute and market the CD made the overall price make sense. I feel that it is unethical for any industry to assume that it is okay to charge even the $0.99 / download of a song as they currently do. The music should be under $0.50 / download if not less considering that there are many things that are no longer involved in the overall scheme. Let's take a look at the online music business model. The artist still records the song, this is typical because the music is now created. Instead though the record industry no longer has to go through packaging, shipping, and marketing of the album to the end-user. This is all done online and at little to no extra cost to the label or artist. Then there is the actual online music stores that again have little cost incurred by making these songs available and marketing. Consider this the overall cost of marketing and distributing online vs. over radio / TV / or billboards/publications is almost all removed. Now instead of this one standard carbon-copy e-mail is distributed to the customers and posted at the main point of entry to the music store interface. So okay maybe they paid a kid to update the webpage with the new CURRENT songs and artist available, but once you have the standard pages made changing the information is easy if not automated. Then with the simple click of a button it is distributed to the customers and to the main storefront. Done, it's like fishing, put the hook and worm on and let the fish do the work. Now what most people aren't considering and what really pisses me off is that this so called SERVICE that they are providing cost the end-user more time and money that it ever did before. For 1 / $0.99 download the end-user utilizes the internet connection, hard drive space, blank CD, time searching / downloading / and burning, just to get the song that he/she wanted. Seems like a lot of work and cost has been placed on the end-user! No wonder people stole music, I mean if I was going to waste my time searching / downloading / and burning a song off of the internet on the connection that I pay for then the f*!#ing song should be free!!! I mean really people wise up, is this really a GOOD DEAL?