Why are HD downloads so expensive?

I respectfully disagree..I'm selective on the HD Tracks I purchase, and these albums are so special to me that I'd spend more money if I had to in order to get the higher quality.

Look at it this way, a Burger King dinner and a bottle of undrinkable wine will cost about the same as a high quality download. The dinner will be gone the next hour, but the digital music will out live us.

I have no idea what the business model is for them, but it works for me.

If you find them on torrents they're free.

I don't eat Burger King or drink cheap wine so the analogy is lost on me ;-)

Don't get me wrong, I wish they were cheaper as well but consider this:

Most new Cd's (44.1/16) go for $10-15 new
Most SACD's go for $25-75 new

Most 24/96 hdtracks go for $17.95 with the 24/192 more $$$

All in all the price is fair. Besides if we don't support this media only cd's and mp3 downloads will survive for hard media (let's face it DVD-Audio and SACD's are very limited markets)

Sign up for hdtracks and you become elligible for 15% discounts from time to time to lessen the pain.

While on the subject of hdtracks did anyone notice the upcoming artists for hdtracks? deep purple, talking heads, joni mitchell, chicago and many more!

I personally cannot wait

The price is determined by the record labels that use HDtracks as an online distributor. In fact they had to raise the price at the record label's request a while back, so pricing was more uniform across all labels.

Also I don't think we should be discussing torrents here. HD tracks is what all of us have been waiting for, finally high resolution media. And especially considering what we pay for gear, the cost of high quality media is worth it and provides an incentive for more labels to make their catalogs available.