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I don't think this is a "try before you buy" type of system. I think the majority of the users ripped music without ever having paying for it.
Rhapsody is a "try before you buy" type of deal. I pay $70 a year to stream whatever music I wish, and part of that is kicked back to the recording companies. (This recently changed being as I was an original Rhapsody member, back in the day when your MP3 could only fit three songs on it - Rhapsody was free to use for me for years.) On average, above and beyond what I spend a year to stream, I also buy about $50 of music, song by song.
It's a really good system being as I buy both new music, and older music from the 70s and 80s that you can't buy on CD these days.
The record companies completely fucked up here. Instead of making it easier to buy music and cutting their costs by delivering it online directly to the consumers and cutting out the usual costs and middle men, they locked everything down. In the end a handful of companies - iTunes and Rhapsody - are now the places to buy music, which takes a huge cut of the profits. They fucked up.
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