I ran across this independent music store, SongSlide.com, while perusing local musicians today. This site, while otherwise not standing out much, has a gimmick to suck your music buying dollars right out of your sympathetic little pocket. Using a sliding scale, SongSlide allows you to pick your price for downloading albums, going anywhere from $6.99 to $99.99. As you move along the spectrum, it shows you how much of your purchase price is going to the artist and how much is going to the website. See example below:

At $9.99, the default price, the artist is getting 62.2% of the price paid for the album. If you are the selfish bastard that takes it down to the minimum $6.99, the artist is only getting 50% of that money. Take it to the extreme $99.99, and the artist is calling home to say, "Screw you, Dad, I'm not a talentless hack who can't make a living playing music."

After all the crap that came out of the RIAA and the recent radio station rate hikes, this looks to be another gimmick to sway you from "pirating" music. Given the inherent guilt factor, however, it seems a little ironic to charge $3.50 simply to serve as a vessel for uploading a 5-song EP. Way to sweep that aspect under the rug, SongSlide.