[Faceman]

The problem never was the price but the flexibility. If I want that particular album with all of its 16 songs I'll buy it (especially modem users will).
But if you hear that one song on TV and you can't remember its name you were stuck until the internet came up. Now you just enter
lyrics "some lyrics you managed to get during the song" into Google
and shortly afterwards you know the title and if you have some Napster-like tool you got the whole song only minutes later.
If you don't do it that way you have to run to the store whistle to the clerk and if he recognizes the song he'll probably tell you that he can "order the Best of-Album for only 25.99" and that it "will probably be there next week".
If record companies developed an easy-to-use reliable online-database for their songs included a good search tool and charged reasonable prices for single songs they'd probably take some people of the Filesharing community. After all Audiogalaxy had a centralized database and was way more popular than anything else when it was up.