A Little Hypocrisy?

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.

CDs cost what they cost because that's what the market will bear. And people who can afford a high-end audio system shouldn't be complaining about the injustices of the marketplace. If you don't like the price, you don't have to buy it. (But that doesn't give you the right to steal it.)

Well, alluding to the above argument about piracy, perhaps the market will not bear what retailers charge for CDs. And I believe the industry just got nailed with price fixing fines, although I don't think they admitted "any wrong doing". So what the "market will bear" has little relevance where organized anti-competitive practices are in effect.

Secondly, most non-Audiogon folks buy only one or two audio systems and keep them for few to many years. On the other hand, most people purchase hundreds of CDs and treat them as the ephemera they usually are. It's typical for the total expenditure on software to exceed that for hardware, except at the very high end of audio.

Also, now that I have answered seriously, this thread is a troll. People complain about the reportedly very high list price to driver cost of Wilson products regularly, for example. Note also the recent BMW priced phono stage (this is not metaphorical) reviewed in S'phile (unwilling to dig the issue out of my reading stack to get the facts). The reviewer liked the component, but acknowledged in so many words that the price is problematic.