The Jeannie is out of the bottle, and it has left our income security in shambles, this much is clear to me.
However, the artistic freedom that comes when an artist has a unique inspiration for one particular style and stays with that for 1,2 or 3 songs but then gets inspired by other styles, moods or genres – should they be forced to produce the mandatory 53 minutes minimum for the old school CD?
Since when can we go to a modern day Picasso and demand he paint 10 more pictures of the same series?
Artistically that's just nonsense. We all know that the muse doesn't function industrially and has the same quantitative output every time. Thats' the death of creativitity.

In between the extremes fall the variety of albums such as Sergeant Pepper – where, dear Quincy, do you still find such daring in pursuit of variety ? Why don't we tell Nashville to stop outputting this cookie cutter (yet amazingly well recorded) re-tread musical copycat BS ?

We can't take back the single download option (or file sharing) so let's be creative and work towards a feasible solution (which I know has not been grasped by anyone out there) and forget about back-tracking to hold on to the ghost of the album by the sheer quantity of songs we might want to sell per customer or fan.

Instead, let's ask I tunes and the other outlets to
1.) give us a full 1 minute preview for each song- and
2.) may every song have it's own artwork!

Furthermore, the place where the album/CD has it's rightful place is the merchandise table at the concert venue – those album sales keep the artist on the road, and they are propelled by the fact that the audience is so inspired by the artist that they want to "take them home" to commemorize their experience.
That's what the album is great for, so of course we will have to keep printing collections of our material to have available at such venues or concerts.

Re: Free File Sharing:
I spent more money in the last 2 years on downloads that I ever spent on CD purchases – I support that model with my wallet. May that help to drown out the free downloading because every person with half a brain knows that the latter has to kill the entire branch over a short period of time.

And lastly, can we talk about the hideous shape of record stores in the US:

I could go on for hours about the attitude of the (minimum wage paid) sales staff in Goth outfit and every piercing imaginable to the dead rows of albums I can't sample, and if they can be sampled, half of the ($ 5.-) KOSS headphones are broken (see BORDERS stores in L.A. or Santa Barbara) …in short: Retail has effectively killed itself, sorry to say, I HATE US record stores with a passion because their sales infrastructure is plain and pitifully dumb.