It seems to me that the charge involved this guy sharing “hundreds of songs” (this is from the article) with a network of “friends.” I suppose the number of friends (not quantified in the article) was substantial, hence the loss claimed by the Recording Industry Association of America.
I can see where the value of loss might be quite substantial and certainly exceeded $1,000.
Nevertheless, it seems plain to me that his case was used as an “example” to warn others not to do what he did.
What you cite is immaterial to the actual punishment; the court "ordered to pay $675,000 for illegally downloading and sharing 30 songs on the Internet."
As you can see the actual punishment is for downloading 30 songs, not "sharing hundreds of songs."
And, here's a question for you; supposing this guy was using BitTorrents as his distribution and had a song that was split up into 100 'chunks' and his Bittorrent served out ONLY one of those pieces to one of a hundred different people. Each downloader only got one percent of the song, and yet only one song in total was served out. Was that one violation or a hundred?
Likewise, let us imagine a downloader who gets a song divided as above, but each of the pieces that he got were from different people. At the end he has ONE song, there were a hundred chunks downloaded from a hundred different people though; is his violation one, or a hundred.
Now, combining the two, assuming each of the sharers owns a legal copy, how much should the injured party get? A thousand from the downloader plus a thousand from each sharer? That would be $101,000 in total, and yet the total "injury" in this case is a single item.