Exacting revenge with a little help from technology.

UNIVERSAL Music Group, which boasts big artists like Eminem, Shania Twain and Mary J. Blige, recently announced it was dropping its list prices for CDs from $18.98 to $12.98. That's a huge drop! Thirty percent! And as a music lover, I might be really excited!

Were it not for Sgt. Pepper.

Actually, "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" the legendary Beatles album many consider to be among the best records ever made. I loved that album. Back in the '60s, when it first came out, I bought it right away. And I played it constantly.

A few years later, I got an eight-track player. So I bought Sgt. Pepper on eight track.

And then a few years later, I got a car, and I put in a cassette player. And so, of course, I had to have Sgt. Pepper on cassette.

I tried recording my scratchy album to cassette the old-fashioned way: by holding up a microphone to my record player. But this only made the cassette come out even more noisy, until John Lennon sounded like Edward R. Murrow.

So I broke down and bought a cassette copy.

That makes three versions of Sgt. Pepper.

And we're not done yet.

After college, they crone out with audiophile vinyl versions of Sgt. Pepper. By this point, I owned a nice little stereo, and naturally, I wanted to hear my beloved album in the finest fidelity, so I purchased it again.

And then came CDs. That made five.

I pretty much bailed out after that because 1) I couldn't afford any more versions and 2) I had no space and 3) I was really mad at the music companies because, unlike other formats, the longer CDs were around, the more expensive they got.

Explain THAT to me.

And I KNOW they were making more on them and it was costing less. But for some reason, the music industry kept those prices up, up, up, while everything technological was going down, down, down, until eventually, our kids began to steal, steal, steal.

And they got really good at it.

So good, in fact--using the Internet as their weapon--that the music industry can't stop it. They've gone to the police. They've gone to Congress. And so now, facing losses of billions of dollars, what does the music industry do?

It lowers its prices.

Sorry, guys. You're about five versions too late. Kids get music with a little help from their friends.

And I'm still mad about the whole eight-track thing.

Mitch Albom is the author of the bestseller "Tuesdays With Morrie."