Would You Pay 5 Cents For a Song?

irikar writes "An academic at McGill University has a simple plan to stop the plague of unauthorized music downloads on the Internet. But it entails changing the entire music industry as we know it, and Apple Computers, which may have the power to make the change, is listening."

Comments

Re:Death of the CD

[R.Caley]

If i could download 15 songs for only $0.75, so why should i ever buy a CD again?

Depends on who `i' is. For variosu people there are:

• Downloads, as easily available to the bod in the street now, sound crap, so if you will ever listen to music on something other than a crappy little MP3 player you will have to buy it again.
• Downloads are ephemeral, so you have to burn CDs and life is too short to do grunt work.
• Downloads don't come with artwork, lyrics, credits etc. unless you go download them and print them and life is too short to do grunt work.
• Downloads are harder to buy than picking up a CD at the supermarket, and life is too short to do online grunt work.

Re:they don't get it, do they?

[wk633]

No, maybe YOU want information for free. Some of us recognize that various industry evilness aside, there are artists out there who deserve something in return for their creative work.

Re:No matter what free will always win...

[stecoop]

I was going to reply to the block pricing above but you asked a legitimate question so let me reply to yours:

First block pricing: is the first stage of the theory but it doesn't account for other hard to analyze costs. It takes a stab at how many pencils can I sell at a given price and make a few bucks instead of analyzing returns on customer transactions. If I have a widget that sells for $100 and you have the same widget for $60 dollars, the consumer may see my product as superior one because of price alone. That is why I think CDs cost more than DVDs; the music industry is trying to appear as a superior product but they are loosing their death grip.

Now your questions on profit/price curve in law of supply and demand:
Any product you sell will have a fixed cost on every transaction. If you can analyze the transaction and while you have them ready to commit to fork over money than anything you extract above that price/cost curve for that transaction is more profit. Back to the Pizza Hut thing; why shouldn't they sell pizza for $5? Well the customer already want the product and they are willing to pay $10. I have increased the price on both single point & total transaction sales and didn't impact demand by actually raising the price but reducing the price for the next pizza. I have extracted further returns from the transaction that already covered the fixed costs. These few little paragraphs can't cover 9 hours of college credit but I hope it enlightens a few on cost theory.

Re:The artists make very little money from music s

[EspressoMachine]

They get like maybe 1$ per cd.

If only that were true. Artists generally make $.05-$.12 a CD. If you want more info about the industry and contracts, etc., I highly recommend This Business of Music. It's chock full of interesting details like formulas used to determine artist royalties. For instance, did you know the labels still take money for R&D costs on the "new technology" of the Compact Disc? Or that many still take out $$ to cover "breakage", which is a hold over from distribution of albums on vinyl?

Oy.