At any rate, it’s a bit of a rip-off ( The Guardian / Adam Webb )

This article is a good look at the bitrate encoding of various paid music download services and what sort of difference in quality you can expect. Personally I have not purchased any 128k encoded files, such as those from iTunes, and I have no intention to in the future. I’d probably buy 320k encoded files, but I wouldn’t pay more than the 128k version. Ideally I’d prefer to get the audio uncompressed and do my own compression on it. It’s probably a very small minority of users who would want to do that..