It's not about under-valuing music. Rather, the music world is over-saturated. Artists don't put music up online for cheap just to encourage pirates to become buyers. It's also to encourage buyers-- like me-- to buy their product when they know someone else has an album just a few clicks away.
That said, I'm a guy with a pretty limited income. Why would I spend $12 getting the 6th (?) Neal Morse album released this year when I could probably get two new albums from Amazon.com's MP3 store for the same price? There's just no incentive. Don't get me wrong; I like Neal plenty. But he and Radiant are just hopelessly behind the times when it comes to getting music out there.
And yeah, I'd love to listen to Momentum, and I'd like to support Neal Morse. But Neal Morse thinks I should pay a $12 minimum just to listen to a digital copy of his album, when almost no-other artists I listen to feel the same way about their own music. I'm not a pirate, so my only choice for right now is to simply not listen.
I'd say 75% of the digital albums I buy, which are almost always MP3 files @ 256kbps (Amazon.com, mostly) cost me $8.99 - some of them are cheaper, yeah, but most are $8.99. Neal is charging a whopping, massive $3.00 more for a digital copy of his album which is high res. I think Neal realizes that his average fan (who is probably closer to my age than yours) doesn't give a shit about a couple of dollars (I don't) but I know not everyone is in the same position.
With that said, I maintain that music has become massively devalued by pirating, but this is not the venue for that discussion.
Anyway, back to the CD -
First impressions:The opening track, which is the title track, frankly, bores the shit out of me. I'll be skipping that one every time I listen to this album. I don't know what it is about that song, it might be that I can't get that awful video out of my head, not sure, but the song doesn't really work for me. "Thoughts Part 5" is pretty cool, I like it. "Smoke and Mirrors" is pretty "meh" I think "Weathering Sky" is pretty decent. "Freak" is....OK I guess. I've been through the epic once so far.
Overall, my first impression is it's fairly typical Neal Morse stuff, and it definitely has his stamp all over it. A lot of the same bag of tricks he's been pulling from for the last half a dozen albums or so. My gut tells me this one was maybe a little bit phoned in. But I need more listens to give it a proper chance to grow on me.