thom yorke was being interviewed about this recently and suggested that the record companies had invited this bad karma on themselves for overpricing, and thus disillusioning their market for years, as well as seeming to promote a narrower and narrower range of music.
whilst I can agree with the record co's up to a point, i think they're quite wrong to equate numbers of downloads with lost sales, and fails to take into account the broadening of what young people want to spend their money on - eg console games, mobile telephony, dvd etc.
99p perhaps is still slightly too much, but at 99 cents in the US it would be bound to be 99p. for things like artwork, people would still be able to buy cds, but be able to buy individual tracks as well, which would be a good thing, for yer iPod and all.
Iain