"Acknowledging that online piracy is forcing dramatic changes in the music industry, the world's two largest record companies are poised to make it easy and cheap for fans to buy rather than steal songs off the Internet."

These aren't MP3's, they are liquid audio files, which means the song contains a code that is tied back to your credit card number. If the song is found in the wild you can be targetted. Liquid Audio has been pursuing this for YEARS now. Its not totally secure. Its not totally unreasonable. Its not an MP3. They'll have a lot of marketing to do to convince people to use this format. They may succeed. When I want to listen to a song, I want to listen to it, and I don't want to deal with slow downloads, choppy files, bad file names, etc...

If they do this right they may fix the telecom industry...

Sony & Universal to sell liquid audio files for 99 cents!!