A Little Hypocrisy?

The main reasons that CD's are expensive is greed, pirating and money losing acts. The record companies are trying to make up for the money they lost on vinyl while they pay their execs millions even if the company loses money. Then, they blame the high costs of CD's on pirating. This may be partially true but it is also true that people would buy more music if the record companies would lower their prices. Also, most of the new artists are crap and it costs loads of cash to produce and market them just the same. MTV now decides what the younger generation listens to.

Another thing I love about the music industry is how flexible they are (tongue firmly in cheek!). I work in an industry where demand is down, the market is somewhat saturated, customers are under cost pressures and competitors help to force pricing down. It's tough as hell, but we actually try to adapt - come up with better value propositions, lower cost of delivery , lower cost of ownership, etc. etc.

The music industry watches their sales go down and just whines and threatens. Guess what guys - you might not be able to get $17 a CD any more! You'd probably sell more if they cost $12 a pop or (gasp) $9.99. I don't know why it costs $17 retail to get CDs into the marketplace, but you're not immune to the same oversupply, added value proposition expectations, reduced costs pressures that basically every other industry is going through.

Needless to say, I don't have a lot of sympathy for their plight.

I agree with all of you who feel the price of cds are to high. As a matter of fact I vent this point ever few months on two of the jazz message boards I frequent and get a lot of support. One of the recommendations I made was to boycott retail stores for a month or two, to buy only used cds or online.

I also agree that if the cds were of better quality then I wouldn't mind paying extra but let's be honest we are a very small minority of buyers in that market. The vast majority of cd purchasers are happy with the current quality of cds because they feel MP3s sound great.

An article recently stated that a large radio corporation is stopping its practice of accepting payola for playing artists cd tracks. If this catches on and other stations join in, then the major labels will have extra cash on the books and lower the price of cds. Alright, stop laughing. I didn't believe they would be that nobel and moral either.

So, what can we do to get the prices to go down?

Hey, did anybody read an article is Stereophile a few months ago where record companies wanted charge everybody that has an internet connection like $17.00 to make up for lost sales due to piracy? In addition, the wanted to charge every consumer like $120.00 for past acts of copying. That proposition went about as far as I could toss W Bush.

Phild,

I have a friend that sells cd,s over the internet. He has a few catalogs that are like 1" thick. Occasionally, I go throught them and pick out 20 to 30 disc. Granted, the big megastars latest releases are usually in the $7-9 range. However, I just got the new James Taylor for $6.89 ($14.99 at Best Buy). The usual rule is take the price that Best Buy is selling if for and multiply by .4 to get the distributor price. Some popular CD are selling for 3 times the distributor price. I have over 5000 CD's and add about 30-40 a month. I would have to seriously curtail my spending if I was paying for retail.

P.S. - I build my own CD racks; seems like I'm building one every 6 months.