Album price should drop to £1

Author
Discussion

Sonic

Original Poster:

4,007 posts

208 months

Friday 15th October 2010
quotequote all
Interesting idea.

I think it would certainly do a good job of combating piracy, but IMO until there is a decent site where you can download anything you want in a large range of formats and quality (i.e a legal oink), either by subscription or pay-per-download, i don't think it's going to go well.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-11547...

The french also have another interesting idea to try and condition people into buying music.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-11549874

telecat

8,528 posts

242 months

Friday 15th October 2010
quotequote all
The question is who would bother to "make" music if they cannot earn a living from it? Yes only a few "make it" really big but many more from Session musicians to "older" artists with home studios still earn money from recording and distributing music.

Dracoro

8,685 posts

246 months

Friday 15th October 2010
quotequote all
They'll make (in theory) MORE of a living.

£1 is a bit too cheap, but £2/£3 would get a lot of sales.

The question is, are the extra sales enough to override the loss in revenue per CD. i.e. 8 sales at £2 an album is better than 3 sales at £5 an album.

The jiffle king

6,921 posts

259 months

Friday 15th October 2010
quotequote all
Dracoro said:
They'll make (in theory) MORE of a living.

£1 is a bit too cheap, but £2/£3 would get a lot of sales.

The question is, are the extra sales enough to override the loss in revenue per CD. i.e. 8 sales at £2 an album is better than 3 sales at £5 an album.
I'm not so sure. You are just looking at Gross rev and when you take into account marginal costs (sure the site must charge a fee, the record company etc etc )

Plotloss

67,280 posts

271 months

Friday 15th October 2010
quotequote all
Seeing as they wholesale at £6.50 it's unlikely to be fair.

thinfourth2

32,414 posts

205 months

Friday 15th October 2010
quotequote all
Plotloss said:
Seeing as they wholesale at £6.50 it's unlikely to be fair.
yeah but lets face it CDs are dead

And i can't see how a download can have a wholesale price

Plotloss

67,280 posts

271 months

Friday 15th October 2010
quotequote all
thinfourth2 said:
And i can't see how a download can have a wholesale price
With regards to downloads, retailers buy the licence to distribute the catalogue.

The cost of the licence for the big 4 is around £10m then there's a cost per track.

tinman0

18,231 posts

241 months

Friday 15th October 2010
quotequote all
This summed it up really:

bbc said:
Paul Quirk, chairman of the Entertainment Retailers Association, said: "Rob Dickins is part of the generation of executives who benefited from the age of £14 CDs and gave the music business a bad name.
The guy is a hypocrite. Now he's on the outside he suddenly "sees" the benefits of cheap music. But when it was paying him a fair decent salary, it was a different story.

Edited by tinman0 on Friday 15th October 18:08

Dracoro

8,685 posts

246 months

Friday 15th October 2010
quotequote all
The jiffle king said:
Dracoro said:
They'll make (in theory) MORE of a living.

£1 is a bit too cheap, but £2/£3 would get a lot of sales.

The question is, are the extra sales enough to override the loss in revenue per CD. i.e. 8 sales at £2 an album is better than 3 sales at £5 an album.
I'm not so sure. You are just looking at Gross rev and when you take into account marginal costs (sure the site must charge a fee, the record company etc etc )
Well quite but they all reduce their charges to get better returns (as they sell more units). There's a balance to be struck though, at a given price point, any lower may not result in more sales. At a given higher price point, people stop buying. Me, I think £5 is the right price, I might buy half a dozen albums from new (to me) bands but a few years ago at £10/£15 I would only buy one after a bit of "research".

I think, given how silly high gig tickets are these days, cheap cds/mps are needed to get people into more music. When I was younger at uni (10/15 years ago) CDs I bought a lot of but it was a big chunk out of my income, however gigs were cheap, many about £5, £10 for more well known bands and about £20 or so for a large gig (saw the Cure at wembley for something like that). Now gig costs are disportionately higher but the music is cheaper.

luke111s

847 posts

189 months

Friday 15th October 2010
quotequote all
Sonic said:
...but IMO until there is a decent site where you can download anything you want in a large range of formats and quality (i.e a legal oink), either by subscription or pay-per-download, i don't think it's going to go well.
http://www.spotify.com/ ?

Sonic

Original Poster:

4,007 posts

208 months

Friday 15th October 2010
quotequote all
luke111s said:
Sonic said:
...but IMO until there is a decent site where you can download anything you want in a large range of formats and quality (i.e a legal oink), either by subscription or pay-per-download, i don't think it's going to go well.
http://www.spotify.com/ ?
You can only stream from spotify and not download, also it's 320k ogg as far as i'm aware, which isn't CD quality.

For subscription i was thinking more £30/month and you can download up to 10 albums or something.

Still, a really good service though!

luke111s

847 posts

189 months

Friday 15th October 2010
quotequote all
Sonic said:
luke111s said:
Sonic said:
...but IMO until there is a decent site where you can download anything you want in a large range of formats and quality (i.e a legal oink), either by subscription or pay-per-download, i don't think it's going to go well.
http://www.spotify.com/ ?
You can only stream from spotify and not download, also it's 320k ogg as far as i'm aware, which isn't CD quality.

For subscription i was thinking more £30/month and you can download up to 10 albums or something.

Still, a really good service though!
£10 per month and you can "download" 3,333 tracks. As far as I am aware they can only be played in the Spotify app, but they do iPhone/Android apps for it.

Sonic

Original Poster:

4,007 posts

208 months

Friday 15th October 2010
quotequote all
luke111s said:
Sonic said:
luke111s said:
Sonic said:
...but IMO until there is a decent site where you can download anything you want in a large range of formats and quality (i.e a legal oink), either by subscription or pay-per-download, i don't think it's going to go well.
http://www.spotify.com/ ?
You can only stream from spotify and not download, also it's 320k ogg as far as i'm aware, which isn't CD quality.

For subscription i was thinking more £30/month and you can download up to 10 albums or something.

Still, a really good service though!
£10 per month and you can "download" 3,333 tracks. As far as I am aware they can only be played in the Spotify app, but they do iPhone/Android apps for it.
Cool, didn't know that, cheers thumbup

defblade

7,441 posts

214 months

Friday 15th October 2010
quotequote all
I'm really not sure how all this works.

My reasearch a few years back found that paying for a legal MP3 download cost more than buying the album off Amazon.

How can that be right?

CD = make a cd. Record to that cd (so music on computer somewhere already). Make jewel case. Do artwork, sleeve notes, etc. Print front, back and booklet. Marry up case, cd, printed stuff. Clingfilm the lot. Pile them all together, box them. Strore them for a bit. Ship them (possibly across the world) to Amazon. Amazon store them. Amazon get order, pick it, pack it and post it.

MP3 = convert to MP3. Pay for bandwidth. (Server maintainence costs less than costs of maintaining all the factory gear, vehicles etc involved in the CD route.)

Streps

2,448 posts

167 months

Friday 15th October 2010
quotequote all
Spotify is awesome for value .
Alot of people are now using it instead of illegally downloading purely due to the quality of music available and also the fact that Itunes is feeling slightly restrictive at the moment.

It's much better than buying a CD,as to be honest once you have burned it onto your pc, you will proberly never have any use for it again in this Ipod age apart from the CD rack.
even in car's you can now just plug your ipod in,instead of using the CD player

Now the internet is widely accessed by the general public all over the world,In my opinion download's are the future.Just like CD's replaced what was before them.And if there is no manufacturing cost's associated with making the actual disk's and cases themselves ,then the price should naturally reflect that.

cazzer

8,883 posts

249 months

Friday 15th October 2010
quotequote all
And you can rip songs off spotify for free too...


Err....did I read the mood of the thread wrongly? smile

Sonic

Original Poster:

4,007 posts

208 months

Friday 15th October 2010
quotequote all
cazzer said:
And you can rip songs off spotify for free too...


Err....did I read the mood of the thread wrongly? smile
hehe

Got any links?