Maverick on Music and the Death of the CD

Mark Cuban of
Blog Maverick fame and owner of the Dallas Mavericks weighs in on the current status of the music industry. He notes, "Apple has done such a  great job of selling us on why we should store our musically digitally, that every one is either doing it, or on  their way to doing it. Which means that 90 pct or more of music being sold is currently being sold on a physical  format that the segment of the music buying public that spends the most amount of money on music doesn't want. They  are being sold CDs. They want to listen to their music from hard drives or flash drives. That's a problem." He also points out that Apple's current structure for iTunes with its DRM doesn't sit right with him.

Cuban is a smart guy with a lot of money. There's something to be said for Cuban's comment that "the only good reason to own a CD.  To deal with the hassles that you know will come from having to  deal with all the different formats that MP3 players will support in coming years." It would be nice if Apple took notice of what he's saying and made some DRM-free move to facilitate the death of the CD and to lessen the hassles that Cuban talks about here. It would be even nicer if I could put my iTMS bought tracks on my PSP after a simple "Convert to mp3"
command, rather than jumping through the burn-to-CD-rip-to-MP3 hoop that Apple currently has in place.