Sandy Pearlman, a professor at McGill University in Canada, appeared in this space last March when he began promoting his idea of five-cent downloads. Pearlmans' reasoning is straightforward: An estimated 45-billion downloads occur without payment, against about 360-million paid downloads. Radically lowering the price would rope in nearly everybody, and the providers would make more money than they do now. Tell that to the providers. Of course, Pearlman knows the impossibility of any movement toward his suggestion, so now he's adding an element to his proposition: Google, yahoo! Microsoft, and other new-media companies should buy out all the major music content holders and implement the five-cents thing. "If you did make available all of the music in the world for almost nothing, suddenly tremendous amounts of money - dwarfing anything the record business has ever dreamt of - would appear, and a lot of it would, I hope, end up in the hands of the creators."