The second trial confirmed the first for the 32 year old mother in Minnesota who illegally downloaded 24 songs. $80,000 per song – ouch. Lots of reasons she was found guilty and the RIAA continues to find, sue and settle with illegal downloaders and reasons that the fine was so high – read more on Yahoo (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_tec_music_downloading).

Three main points to make:
1) Outside of Rhapsody, Zune and Napster – there is not a good way to get lots of access to music without paying per song. The iTunes model of pay per song is compelling, and the radio stations like Pandora are nice but neither fills the void of a subscription service.
2) There are millions of people illegally downloading and burning music and only a few hundred to thousand are getting caught and sued. The RIAA will continue it’s campaign, but I doubt it will have much effect on the overall market.
3) Until Apple dives into the subscription business – which it has long rumoured to be considering – the subscription model will not be mainstream. The killer app is having a music subscription service on the iPod, iPhone and everything else. Once this happens, the subscription services will be main stream.