No where on Earth is it "all or nothing" my friend.

The Electoral College disproves you.

You already know no one (and I mean NO one) is going to use YouTube as an alternative to downloading an MP3. Let's see... choice of $0.99 to download the song and use it on your MP3 player, or have to go to a website, on your computer, and stream the video every time you want to listen to it. Yeah, people were DEFINITELY using YouTube to avoid buying music. Lots of lost sales there, yep!

I download all of my songs off of YouTube and then I just play the videos on my computer. If I want to load them to a digital music player, I can rip the audio.

Flash video files are excessively easy to manipulate once you get them. Getting them is no problem, either.

I also can't think of anyone who goes through the trouble of ripping the video from Youtube to rip out the low quality audio to put on their mp3 player.

Low quality? The quality is hardly "low". And the trouble isn't. Also, I just play the videos through a playlist and a disable video. It saves disk space, and if I want to view the videos, I have that option, too. It's quite trivial to download the video and rip the audio as well for my music players, or convert to the video-readable format..

And I get to circumvent broken links that happen because of the damn DMCA takedowns and site maintenance that happens during my normal awake hours.