The current digital music revolution has thrown the industry up in arms, leaving record companies with the burden of finding new ways to discourage illegal file sharing and to encourage sending music fans to the record stores to pick up new releases.

Since listeners discovered file sharing and began downloading free tracks, record labels have tried to give fans extra incentives to purchase albums.

The first gimmick was adding CD-ROM-based bonus content to discs. If you placed the disc in your computer, you could watch the artist's music video or exclusive interview, or gain access to a special Web site.

When reading the sticker on the Foo Fighters stellar 1999 album, There is Nothing Left to Lose, I was excited that all of the above features would be available to me at the click of my mouse once I popped the CD into my computer.

After I put the disc in, a screen came up, which then froze my system for 15 minutes while it loaded the content.

So, after the disc spent more time loading than it takes to cook some tasty Ramen Noodles, I could finally access my bonus content. To my surprise, the "bonus" content only lasted five or six minutes.

It took longer to load and exit out of the menu screen post-viewing than it did to watch the extra material.

The more albums I purchased with CD-ROM extras on them, the more problems I had, and the more disappointed I was with the actual content.

A few years later, after the DVD format started to reel in tons of support, labels had the idea of including a DVD with albums released by popular artists.

The DVD option seemed to be an improvement: It's less prone to error and can hold more content than a CD already containing a full album of music.

As a consumer, I initially thought this idea was fantastic. I wouldn't download my favorite band's new album for free if I could buy it in the store and get a DVD along with it.

And so October 2002 rolled around and I purchased One By One, the Foo Fighters newest release at the time. When I arrived at the store to purchase the album, I saw there were two versions: the regular album, and the "special edition," which included the DVD I was excited to purchase.

The special edition, of course, ended up costing me an extra $5, but I didn't think twice about spending the extra money.

I put the DVD into my player, and six minutes later I was extremely pissed off. Not only did this DVD have just about the same amount of extra content as the CD-ROM, but it was also laden with advertisements.

Although I purchased a few albums that contained DVDs with relevant content (these often cost twice or three times the price of a regular album) several other albums I purchased that included a so-called bonus DVD followed suit with the same lame marketing ploy and letdown.

So when the Foo Fighters released their most recent album, In Your Honor, last summer, and the sticker right beside its $26.99 price tag promised that this new double-disc "special edition" album included a new "dual-disc format" technology, I smartened up: I decided to download the music for free instead.

I have put my foot down and decided that I will no longer be scammed by the music industry's ploys to suck more money out of my wallet.

A brilliant idea for the recording industry would be to cut out the garbage that consumers obviously don't want and lower the prices.

If record labels are adding extra content and charging the same price or just a few dollars more than traditional albums without the bonus content, then in theory the value of the original product has decreased.

The discs cost the same price to manufacture, no matter how much "bonus" stuff that the companies on to them.

Instead of fighting against the digital music revolution, why not join it and make music and bonus features readily accessible to fans directly from artists' Web sites?

Great progress has been made by online music services such as Apple's iTunes.

But now the Recording Industry Association of America has decided that iTunes should increase its prices, which will inevitably send the relationship between the two down the toilet.

My message to the RIAA: stop trying to scam us and give us what we want at a reasonable price: the music that we have always loved. We'll buy it if you treat us with more respect.