Incredible: Apple responsible for 25% of US music sales

I propose everyone gives feedback to Apple that what we want is iTunes in FLAC or Apple Lossless formats at 24/96kHz

Oh man, I am 41 and I got you beat. We had 45s, 78 rpm lps (regular albums are 33 1/3 rpm), 8-track. I first got hooked buying 45s and 12 inch singles - and full length lps. I was working in a record store when CDs started seeing ($16 versus the $9.99 lp). I held off for a while, but I eventually got hooked on CDs. I had a dozen before I had a CD player. I never got into buying cassettes and cassete singles. Today I buy 99.99% of y music from iTunes. But thats nearly all song by song. If I know I want the full album, I usually buy the CD. But thats Raaaaare. I also burn all my iTunes purchases to audio CD.

CDs are no indestructible -- I have seen supposedly top quality CDs develop holes, and get scratched easily. And they sound really good if you spend decent amounts of money on the playing equipment.

I don't listen to any of the stuff you can buy from the iTunes store, so mine has to come on CD which gets ripped to my HD straight away.

Hmm ... what about disaster recovery? With purchases that are purely electronic ... what happens to your music if your hard drive fails and say you purchased 20GB or more of music perhaps from different sources and aren't disciplined enough to have back-ups. Or what happens if one or more of those sources has a disaster or worse disappears. Add to that the quality issues already identified .. no thanks I'll still be buying CDs. Give me physical media please!

I agree with Galley. Unless it isn't available or is too high priced, my music comes to me on CD which I rip. Same with DVDs. The discs give me higher resolution and more importantly BACKUPS. The ripped versions are compressed and lower quality, but I can fit more of them on my PMP.

"I know it's impossible to say what I'm about to without sounding like a grumpy old man, but here it comes anyway. For me, the tremendous thing isn't that Apple has commandeered the market so handily, it is the rate at which the distribution model has evolved."

Umm.. yeah.. it only took 50years for the industry to change. (and they're still kicking and screaming about it)

Wait, you didn't go through an 8-track phase?

I just wish that all digital content you can buy would be of maximum quality. I don't want to pay for 192 kbit. I pay for CDs which I rip to any quality I see fit my current stereo best (I know, there are lower or better qualirt CD recordings too). When I buy or rent a movie online, I want HD.

CDs will still continue to be sold as long as I'm alive. I'm buying more now, than I ever have in the past 24 years.

I'm not too surprised by this. Given that Apple sells the #1 PMP and the #1 smartphone in the US; and both of those have a music service essentially attached to them, that's certainly a recipe for large market share.