Music Companies Convicted of Price Fixing Again

InspectorPraline writes "Providing more proof that the record industry is indeed a oligopoly, this article at the New York Times reports that two major record companies, Vivendi Universal and Warner Communications, have been convicted of price fixing by the FTC over a recording from 1998 of the Three Tenors. While Warner reached an agreement with the FTC about a year ago, Vivendi continues to deny wrongdoing and will, of course, appeal." The FTC's release is quite informative, describing the entire case.

Comments

How About These Examples?

[krmt]

I have an argument against price fixing. How about CD's that cost less to make?

Wilco's new "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" album was recorded for some incredibly cheap sum, like a few thousand dollars. Yet it's sitting there with the same price tag at Best Buy as the huge manufactured pop albums. Add this to the fact that Wilco released the entire album on the internet themselves before the CD was released, and they've still already turned a profit on the thing.

Another example is the new Massive Attack DVD compilation of music videos. If you've seen this thing in stores, it's basically a clear plastic case with a boring looking DVD inside. That's it. No artwork or inserts. Nothing. The reason for this is that Massive wanted to keep the costs for the buyer as low as possible (they're giving profits to charity). You can go their website and download the artwork for yourself (you even have three choices of which artwork you want). But what happened when they talked to retailers? The retailers said that the DVD would be marked up to the same price as all the others on the shelves, even though it cost them a hell of a lot less to buy. The details are all on Massive Attack's site (I think in a newspost from 3d, although it might be in the forums).

Either way, there's a lot of price fixing and gouging going on, and no matter what steps are taken by the artists themselves, short of delivering the CD's directly to fans, they can't get the retail price down.