A Little Hypocrisy?

When I read the starting post, I had the same thought as Rdr4b. People complain about audio prices all the time. As always it is funny to watch some of you look at a forest with a microscope, and call yourselves biologists. When you buy a CD, you are not really buying the plastic and aluminum, and Circuit City and Best Buy, I guarantee, are not making money on CDs. From the distributor, a CD costs a store around $9, new releases around $11, but it varies quite a bit. That $16 retail CD has to pay a lot of people. Its the same thing as books.

The items offered on Audiogon tend to represent the higher end of what's available in music reproduction equipment. As such the record exec is making an argument that the better quality, presumably hi-rez, CDs should cost $15/each. That price seems reasonable to me.

I think it's strange that cassette tapes are less expensive than CDs. They cost the same or more to produce than CDs. When CDs first came out the price was 6-7 dollars more than a tape. Maybe they were more expensive to produce then, but now that production is so cheap why are tapes still less expensive? It seems to me that CDs should have actually dropped in price over the years instead of going up.

Some may buy the $5000 cd player, many more will buy the $100 cd player. We all must buy the $17 cd.

I shop for audio gear on Audiogon to save 30-60% on my purchases. I shop for music at BMG, Columbia House, the multiple annual sales at Streetside records where everything is 20% off, new releases when they're 20% off, Amazon when you can find used, etc. etc. In other words, I don't pay 15 to 20 dollars a CD. I'd guess my average price per CD is 10 to 11 dollars. I only complain a bit, and about both, but I'd say that retail price on CDs is just as ficticious for me as retail price on audio equipment.