Yeah, I know personally when Napster and Kazaa were around I spent $0 on music. Now, I spend quite alot on music, and I'm happy to pay it for DRM free music; $1 isn't bad for a track. I think they should be about $.50, then I would buy like there was no tomorrow, but at least its DRM free now. That was a huge battle for pirates, and they made enough noise and won it. You think DRM free would have disappeared without pirates? Now, it is arguable whether or not they were the cause of it being DRM in the first place, but I generally think that was mostly due to companies that got greedy like Sony. But since then, Sony has blown the PS3 wide open with different things the PS3 can play (divX, mp3, wma, wmv, and many other file types). Plus, I can say alot of my other friends buy much more music too. Up until iTunes went DRM free, some had never bought a single song.
@ LaughALot, I think its important to note that just because you don't see many retail covers doesn't mean they aren't buying music. They could be buying it through iTunes, which of course would not ship them a cd, it would be digital. Just sounds more like you don't trust your friends. And technically, you can buy music without getting a retail cover physical or digital. Example, one of my computer science professors buys ALL of his music...from Russia. He payed for it. He won't get a retail cover about 99.9% of the time. But digitally you could just download the cover from a simple google search. It's sometimes tough to tell the difference then...sometimes arguably impossible.