Slashdot reports that the record companies want online music stores to up the prices on downloadable music from 99 cents per track to somewhere between $1.25 and $3. My music downloading habits center around immediate gratification. If there’s a song I want to hear right now, I generally download it. Before the iTunes Music Store, I downloaded songs using Gnutella if I wanted to hear them. Now I buy them for 99 cents. I don’t think the prices would have to go up a whole lot for me to fire up the Gnutella client again (something I haven’t done literally for months).

Related: Ed Felten, A Grand Unified Theory of File Sharing. I fall completely into the sampler category of file sharers (actually no category right now, as I don’t use any file sharing clients).