Napster 2.0 is going to be released today, and for those who remember and/or used the original version, its arrival will most likely be greeted with about as much indifference as a “Bob Graham for President” rally.

This time, the Napster name is placed on a legitimate music-buying service. However, according to USA Today, its legitimacy comes at a price some other legitimate music services aren’t forcing the buyer to pay — if you want to transfer songs to an MP3 player or another computer, there will be an additional cost.

Is this resurrection really going to change things? In short, no. People are going to continue to ignore the wishes of the Recording Industry Association of America.

Instead of welcoming new formats, perhaps by running a service of its own or helping another one, the RIAA has devoted itself to prolonging what at its base is a 20-year-old technology because it was too complacent to come up with a new one. It is the first group that might have both the ability to generate legions of lawyers at will and the desire to literally sue everyone in the country, or at least all those who have used “music” and “download” in the same sentence.

The RIAA argues it has been hurt because music sales have gone down for a third straight year, attributing the slump directly to online piracy.

It can’t be because there are fewer CDs being released, right? According to an Associated Press graph that ran in the Waterloo Courier Sept. 12, the number of shipped CDs dropped from around 950 million in 2000 to 800 million today. It can’t be because the average price of a CD has crept up — it was $15 in 2002, a steady increase from about $12 in 1990, according to another graph. It must be because of illegal activity.

Cost is not the only factor in this saga, but it certainly is a big one. Now that the entire physical product itself can be created for under a dollar, it’s hard to see where the other 93 percent of the cost goes. The RIAA says there must be compensation for the artists’ efforts, studio fees, marketing campaigns, and promotion to get the song on the radio.

That is true, even though the artists themselves receive very little. But from the view outside the studio, it seems strange the cost of making a CD has dropped drastically and yet prices are the same. Even with inflation, prices of an unchanged technology tend to drop; the vast majority of CDs do not contain extras justifying more cost. If there is that much more being spent on making the album, maybe the strategy and/or profit margins need to be rethought. Universal is cutting costs, but the inherent problem with buying a CD is still there.

That’s the other part. Simply put, people are through with coughing up $13 to $17 (or more) to get one or two songs they’ve heard before and a whole bunch of material they may or may not like. This limited listener experience, depending on where you think the blame lies, is the fault of the recording labels, Clear Channel, or whoever got radio stations to play that Nickelback song every half-hour between fall 2001 and fall 2002. If listeners are only able to hear one song by an artist they’re unfamiliar (or even familiar) with, they’re going to be reluctant to purchase a whole CD.

Instead of ceaselessly pumping up a tiny fraction of the songs out there, why not promote a more widespread variety? Because that would ruin the system. As long as the public will willingly accept whatever is being fed to them, the system ain’t broke, so why fix it?

But the system is broken. Listeners are tired of paying so much for what they might not like, and artists who might be profitable if only they got a little promotion must subsist on the crumbs left by the big deals.

That is what the RIAA, the labels and even some music services, including Napster 2.0, can’t figure out. Users want what they know or what they have at least sampled. And once they’ve gotten it, they want to be able to exercise their usage rights freely.

If users are only familiar with a small portion of the spectrum and have to pay a lot for untested material, and decide not to buy it, that is not the users’ fault. It is more beneficial to get a small royalty for one song than no royalties for an unpurchased CD, but the RIAA and labels don’t understand that.

You can’t blame the RIAA for trying, only for its methods. It is protecting its intellectual property. The problem is its resistance to advocate services truly serving the user that, even with costs involved, would be attractive to those currently using Kazaa.

Maybe Apple’s iTunes Music Store for Windows will be the watershed event that tells everyone how music consumers want their music in the 21st century. But if the sales system does not change, if everyone has to either pay for unwanted things or resort to illegal means to get those songs that have been pounded into their heads, then the record labels might as well be selling 8-tracks.