UK CD Singles - End Of The Affair

Spent the afternoon ripping all my UK CD Singles I'd bought at the Inverness HMV (and Amazon UK/Warpmart) into iTunes. Given that HMV writes the price on a big alternative UPC sticker on all their CD Singles I decided to add up what I spent in 4 months of working in the dark of Inverness:

£90 or $162USD/$205CAD

This got me about 78 songs, 312.8mb (at 128kbps AAC) or 5.8 hours of music including doubles. Of which I'd be hard pressed of to find 1 hour that I really like and did not end up buying the LP.

The entire time I (at the very least) curbed my P2P use for downloading and previewing songs. At about the rate of about $610CAD/year I will receive about 3 LP's worth of music that I actually like.

So my question as to wether or not the UK CD Single market is an already suitable pre-existing solution to the grey legality of the P2P try-before-you-buy has a resounding answer:

No. It's expensive and rather fruitless.