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Attorney General Investigates Music Price Fixing
An anonymous reader writes "The Guardian is reporting that the US Attorney General has launched an investigation into whether or not record labels are engaged in price fixing of music downloads. From the article: 'The department of justice inquiry centers on the activities of the four largest record labels: EMI, Sony BMG, Universal and Warner Music. Subpoenas are believed to have been issued to all parties, with federal officials understood to be focusing on whether the companies have been colluding to keep the price of downloads artificially high.'"
Another pretty good article on this subject can be found at this site
Everyone is greedy to a point. Some are just able to carry their greed to the point of complete selfishness and totally ignore the high percentage of people who have a hard time just keeping a roof over their heads.
What the heck will it take? Evolution of the human species? I always think back to those old Star Trek episodes where they land on some planet where the inhabitants laugh kindly at Earth's culture because they have learned to live without greed, take care of everyone, and actually enjoy sex rather than codify it.
I don't know why I want to write this... mod at your leisure. But before you bite my head off, I want to make sure all the future commenters out there read this very key quote: Hopefully that will keep those crazy anti-Apple fanboys at bay.
Keeping the prices high? Are you kidding? If you think 0.99 per song is high you ain't seen nothing yet baby. As soon as we can get people to stop using iTunes and a MS based system instead with no Steve Jobs to protect consumers, and his bottomline, we will really be ramping up the price!
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
...they have to pay a $50 fine and publish a press release including the words "We are vewwy, vewwy sowwy." Rinse, repeat 10 years later...
Once upon a time, there were two farmers. One farmer sold apples and other sold pears. Now, if you know anything about these two fruits, it's that they are very similar. Each farmer only grew that one crop on his land because the soil and weather conditions didn't allow for the raising of the other fruit crop. At the market, though, customers could buy either one easily. In fact, the prices were within cents of each other.
"There must be some kind of collusion," the customer thought to himself, "some kind of price fixing that is artificially keeping the prices of these apples and pears high." So he sued them both and the pear farmer went bankrupt fighting the suit in court. The apple farmer managed to settle out of court with the customer, but not without incurring a substantial cost to himself.
Then pears went off the market and the price of apples went sky-high. "A-ha!" said the customer, "I was right all along. The farmers must have kept the prices relatively equal in order to maximize their profits. Now that there is no reason for the apple farmer to keep the prices even with pears, he has raised it substantially!" The customer was satisfied with himself for having been clever enough to discover the nefarious plot.
The apple farmer, back on his farm, sat at the drawing table and muttered to himself about his terrible luck. "I am losing a lot of business to these high prices. If only I weren't forced to raise them so high to fight that worthless lawsuit. If only... If only..." "The pear farmer and I don't even sell the same produce..."
I've been curious why it costs more to buy an entire album via download, than it does to buy the cd... IIRC it cost the lables more to make a tape, than to produce a cd, and the prices for cd were greater than tapes. Now without having to produce a pyhsical tangible disc or tape, the costs are higher still, witrhout packaging and liner notes, and printing costs. smells like price gouging to me.
http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/ 03/1543256
Sorry guys, but leeching off the works of others is old hat - time to find really, genuinely good acts, or put up "for Sale" signs.
Physics is nothing like religion. If it was, we'd have an easier time trying to raise money!
They are 10 years late and investigating the wrong medium. I don't see anything wrong with 99 cents per song, my issues were the $21 for a CD with one decent song.
http://www.allofmp3.com/
It doesn't matter if it's apt. It doesn't matter if it's expressive. It doesn't matter if it's relevant to the situation, or if it accurately parallels reality. It doesn't even matter if it makes any sense.
If you make a post-length analogy, you will get +1 insightful.
(Rule 2 of slashdot is that if you say "I know I'm going to get moderated down for saying this, but...", you will get moderated up.)
I'm not really sure how relavent the old style labels are to the modern music industry. Strip away the hype and the fact remains
with federal officials understood to be focusing on whether the companies have been colluding to keep the price of downloads artificially high
a aaauh[/Drawn Together]
[Drawn Together]Ah DUUUUUUUUUUUuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
my issues were the $21 for a CD with one decent song.
That's why I head to the local pawn shop (which, ironically, doesn't have chess sets) and pick up 10 CDs at a time. Volume discount means I pay $21 for ten CDs, each with one to four decent songs encoded without psychoacoustic distortion on a durable medium. The current m4p/wma business model, on the other hand, makes no provision for a counterpart to the used CD market.
Price fixing has been a hallmark of the music industry for fifty years. Let's look at CD's.
It costs any record company, on average, about $0.25 to get one CD into a retail store. This includes:
Normally, manufacturers strive to keep their cost per unit at or below 12.5% of the retail price. The distributor then buys the unit at 30% to 40% of retail. The retailer buys the unit at 60% of retail. The customer buys the unit at (you guessed it) full retail price.
Let's see how the typical $16 CD retail price breaks down:
But Wait!!! Most record companies are their own distributors. More profit for them.
We see now that $0.25 (real cost) is about 1/8 of the production cost calculated here. Following the model, one CD should cost about $2.00.
Which is still more than most of the trite crap produced these days is worth. Music isn't a cash cow, it's a cash herd.
Well all I can say to that is you are really, really living up to your name. Well done.
...wait a second, I thought that you could fix prices all you wanted to on non-essential products. Wasn't The Sherman Anti-Trust act addressing critical comodities, such as food, fuel and similar vital products that are important to the economy?
I think the RIAA is inhuman scum as much as the next slashdot basement troll, but who really cares if they collude to set the price for old Tiffany songs at $8 or $16? I don't need them to live, so they can form a big evil cartel and charge ONE HUDRED BILLUN DOLLARS if they want to.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Where was this investigation a decade ago when it was price fixing and racketeering of the music printing and distribution business that resulted in $18 CDs as the cost of doing business and bringing the product to market declined?
It's funny too because all the clean-up this investigation could possibly lead to won't save the labels of the RIAA. They long ago crossed the line, laughed, and STILL refuse to acknowledge their misdeeds. It's a good thing consumers aren't suffering their tyranny anymore.
Don't they realise that 90% of albums make a loss?! That marketing and distribution is incredibly expensive? That the few artists who do make a profit essentially provide a subsidy so the record companies can go out and find new talent?
Do these busybodies not grasp that record company executives need to have two new luxury cars every year?
Do they not realise that by the time you've bribed DJs all around the world to play your music rather than the interesting demo some promising new band sent them, there's only enough money left for bonuses in the region of $20 million/year? How can record companies hope to continue attracting the best chief executives if they can only pay $20million in bonuses?
Do we really want the government hassling the record labels in the same (sort of) way they've been hassling music pirates, just because the record labels should have terrible things happen to them? Maybe this is the flip side of the War on Unauthorized Clicking, and sure, turnabout is fair play... but none of that makes this a good idea.
These people will not leave us alone until we start piling their children into dump trucks. Cheering them on won't make things better. Boohing them doesn't seem to do much good either, but at least those of us boohing don't deserve the world they want to create.
I don't care about price fixing of music downloads. Look at price fixing of physical CDs instead. How can a music CD cost the same as a movie DVD? And while they're at it, make them use the true CDROM standard, without drm hacks.
1) Cold hard cash will be transfered under "campaign contribution" from the mysterious Big Four to the US Attorney General.
2) Investigation will reveal nothing.
3) Profit!
Anybody notice whenever something happens an investigation is started and you never hear about it again?
"You're everywhere. You're omnivorous."
Different music labels sell different products. Sure, they both sell music, but this one sells Britney Spears and that one sells Nine Inch Nails. The products may be similar, but they are not interchangeable. A label with more desirable artists will sell more product than the one with less desirable artists.
The product is the artist, not the band. And so unless you are talking specifically about artists that have cross-label contracts, you'll have to agree that the music companies are all selling similar, but not identical stuff.
Anti-trust investigation of a company strong-arming consumers? Delivered to you by the Bush Administration and the evil henchman Alberto Gonzales.
Because, you know, they're in the back pocket of business.
Even if the attorney general did decide to take some action, it would undoubtedly be some slap-on-the-wrist fine or equally ineffective measure. Nobody seems to ever consider doing something that might be effective. In this case, the problem is at its root caused by the government-granted monopoly of copyright. No copyright, no problems! If the government is unhappy with the copyright monopolies they have created, why not strike the problem at its root and weaken the copyrights of those who abuse them?
This would work not just on music companies but on any business built on copyright; for example software businesses such as Microsoft. Instead of a fine, simply slash the duration of copyright on the company's assets, or even release some portion of them to the public domain immediately. This would not only serve as a deterrent to future abuses; it would actually reduce their *ability* to commit abuses in the present, and it would measurably benefit the public as well.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
...your numbers are just plain wrong.
Hell, it would cost more than a quarter just to *ship* one CD.
Let's look at some more realistic assumptions.
First: Let's say a "typical" CD sells 100,000 copies (they don't, on the average, but we'll go with the 100K number).
We'll assume the band is made up of five guys.
If they're using a good studio (not the cheap-ass garage-based kind), you're looking at $10,000 for studio time alone. A good producer will want to pay for a good engineer, so there's another $10,000 or so. Add in design costs, and actual physical production, and you're looking at upwards of $50,000 for a serious production (yeah, you can get an album hammered out at your cousin Phil's for a couple of thousand, but you can also drink Budweiser).
So you're up to 50 cents a pop, just for recording and preproduction.
CDs in bulk cost about 25 cents each for actual physical production in huge quantities, with labels and in boxes.
So there's 75 cents in real production costs, and everyone concerned is going to make *zero* profit.
Now, the label gets into the act, they have a bunch of people out there looking for the Next Big Thing, and they have to be paid for. The people who own the studio also need to be paid. Then there's the band. Suppose each of these groups make 50 cents a pop for each CD sold (a not-extreme number).
So you're up to $2.25 in actual physical production costs plus royalties and a moderate amount of profit.
Now, here's the hard part: Moving the damned things around. They have to go from the factory that prints the CDs, to the warehouse owned by the label, then to the first middleman. You're up to $2.50 a pop now.
That first-level middleman is going to want to make some profit, too. So he's going to take that $2.50 in costs and double it (he has to pay his warehouse crew, plus his staff, plus pay the rent on the building, et cetera - doubling is pretty common in order to make a decent profit). So you're at $5 a shot, and it's in a big buildding out in St. Loius or something.
Now, the middleman takes orders from all of those little retailers, plus all of the big retailers, and ships them out UPS (or the like). Every Tuesday, those retailers get that week's stock of CDs in, and what to they do? They double the cost (what the middleman charged with shipping coss, then a markup for the store's costs, which include rent, staff, and al otehr costs).
So even for the "cheap" model of production, you're looking at $10 CDs.
Which is, oddly enough, what the price is for "discount" CDs of fairly popular bands, and what most local bands charge or their locally-producred discs.
NOTE:
The numbers above assume a fairly high number for a "typical" CD. The real average is closer to 5,000 than 100,000...
There's also the "risk taker" model to be included. They don't charge $16.99 ($12.99 at Best Buy) for a successful CD to rip you off. They charge that much to pay for the next CD they put out that tanks in the market, where they eat all production costs yet still have to pay those folks all up and down the line.
I think the point is that price fixing fosters piracy, so you can't both claim that piracy is hurting your business, and then charge 'a hundred billun dollars' for some song(s). Anyone who wants those has to steal them, just like with prohibition... making something that is already extremely popular illegal just makes everyone an outlaw and fails to address the problem.
stuff |
It is good to be audited by your friends.
"So even for the "cheap" model of production, you're looking at $10 CDs."
Impossible.
Sony BMG has once-a-month sales where they ship CD's to your house at $6-7 per disk. Presumably when I buy a $6 CD, Sony is not losing money, so it suggests the cost is significantly lower than you calculate.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
I read about this on Friday and again on Saturday (in paper form). I'd only expect to see this on /. if something NEW had happened.
I know, I know..."shut-up and get back in your cage with the other trolls and lemmings."
The price of mainstream DRM-less downloaded music is still infinity.
(The various attorney generals should just stay out of it at this point; they're a few dacades late to the game. There were two monopolies and they're both getting broken. Distribution, of course, was broken about five years ago with the widespread availability of broadband. The second, airplay, is in the process of being broken with the advent of satellite radio. It'll further get broken when/if they finally come out with EVDO Internet radios.)
Cardinals are conducting an investigation whether or not the pope is Catholic. Results might depend on the question whether he wants to be or not.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
A few reasons.
I'm not 'flaming', or trying to be a prick in any way. It just seems that most Digg users don't understand why we aren't deserting Slashdot in droves for their site. You asked, I answered.
"Presumably when I buy a $6 CD, Sony is not losing money..."
You presume wrong, or at least, you presume halfway.
That's for a direct shot from Sony to you, without the middleman, getting rid of excess inventory (rather than throw them away, they sell them to folks like you for a cut price). These aren't "profit CDs, they're "cutting our losses" CDs.
Those $6 to $7 CDs are part of the *costs* of the expensive ones (where they make the profit that they don't make on the cheap "get them out of the warehouse for the new issues" discs).
And you might note that they charge you (ta-daa!) *shipping* for those CDs...
AG: Did you four callude to raise the price of music?
EMI: ahhh, no.
Sony: no.
BMG: er, no?
Warner: what was the question again? oh, yeah, definetly not.
AG: Well, that settles that, sorry for the inconvenience. BTW, hot dogs and hamburgers at my place tonight.
And when they're done with that, they can investigate price fixing in everything else from video games to Weber grills.
:)
(OK, so I realize examples that spanned more of the alphabet than from V to W would have been better, but it's early.
It's always the customer's fault.
1) The sales they have are $6-7 including shipping
2) BMG has at least gotten into the 1990's. They email their monthly choice and I decline on their web site. Still not free, but cheaper than sending letters back and forth
3) Their choice is better than a department/5-10, but not as good as a real record store.
4) I understand the business model, but if they can sell CD's out the door for $6-7 (right now the sale is $6 shipped), that suggests they could easily sell CD's retail for $10. I think if these guys dropped prices to under $10 retail, we wouldn't be having many discussions on piracy. But at $18? Yikes. That's an investment. The band better be really really really good to get $20 ($18 plus tax).
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Since when can you buy a CD with more than 10 songs for less than $9.99? Because that's the most it will cost you on iTunes. If the album has fewer songs, it's $.99 * # songs.
There are exceptions, where they've priced 15 minute tracks higher than $.99, and there are multi-CD albums, but those are sensible exceptions, not the rule.
If you ask me though, .99 is still highway robbery. My download has no overhead other than iTunes bandwidth fee, which is pennies per sale.
If labels wernt so busy throwing money at studios and into advertising so they can get the band into debt, then they would only have to sell a few thousand tracks to break even. Most bands with any talent at all can sell that much in less than a year, and nationaly known band will make that back in the first day.
Let's cut to the chase, shall we?
The "product" costs $2.50 to get out of the factory to the distributor. That sounds reasonable, I'll buy those prices.
I don't buy two more doublings from there to the stores. If there's 300% profit between the distributor and the public, then someone's going to come in and buy from the distributor and ship directly to their stores, and sell them for $5.00.
If you can't do that, because none of the distributors will sell direct to retail, then guess what... that's price fixing.
I always thought that the high price of ringtones was some sort of a 'stupid tax' designed to protect the general public from having to listen to the latest Snoop Dogg obnoxiousness every time some asshole's phone goes off on the train.
Obviously it's not working. Verizon, would you please, PLEASE increase the price on ringtones? How about $19.95? Wait -- I've got an even better idea -- why don't you bill it at 20 bucks per ring? You'll get right on that? Thanks.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
"I always think of how it can cost 99 cents to download a full song from iTunes... but then a ringtone... costs 3 dollars"
That's because p2p networks still keeps prices on downloads down.
$0.99 per song isn't "cheap"... iTMS attraction is that I don't have to buy 10 songs I don't like to get one I do. If I like the music enough to want the whole album, I buy the CD.
It's the album price that limits the iTMS price. They couldn't get away with charging significantly more than CDs on iTMS when they get less for it.
The prices of ringtones are high because you only need to buy a few, maybe even one, and unless you're a total pop culture slut once you find one you like you're unlikely to buy another for six months.
And they don't need P2P ringtones. If you're savvy enough to be using P2P and you have a cellphone, there's bunches of programs out there that will let you take any chunk of a song and turn it into a ringtone for all kinds of phones. People don't care, because the $3 for the ringtone is nothing compared to the $1000+ they're paying for the phone over a 2 year contract.
Speaking of which, is the music or the cellphone industry a bigger rip-off?
You do hear about it again. It's just that the investigation takes time and the public eye doesn't return until later. I mean, if you got news every day about the SCO case...that's a lot of junk you'd be getting. Court cases take time, and most people don't care about all the junk that goes on. People just want to hear the important bits.
Before you die, you see DoubleRing...
Will someone with a subscription please tag this article as a dupe?
Badass Resumes
Over here, any "normal" audio CD (normal, as in "mainstream, not some rare collectors import"), costs an average of 15 euro. Thats as much as CDs did cost back in the 80ies when the CD itself was brand new technology, and during the 90ies you could buy actual titles (not "CBS best price" titles) for (converted) as low as 5 euro...
'nuff said.
I recently discovered for myself the used CD market on ebay.
I have currently purchased about ~50 cds. I got most for about $3 - $4 each on average including shipping. Each CD is a full album (no singles). Most have 10-15 songs on them. Many come from shops specializing in the sale of used cds...
Which means I'm paying about $0.30 per song. And to think that someone had to collect these CDs, figure out which ones were scratched, which not, advertise on ebay, put them into a box, and ship them to be via the postal mail...
Even if 25% of the CD is so scratched up that my computer can't read it, I still come out -- way ahead. And I like to think that maybe I'm helping someone [non-RIAA] out... (which may/may not be the case)
And to think that we currently have an *industry* selling electronic copies of songs for $0.99? Thery already had the digitized recording from the recording studios... Bandwidth these days is practically free. There is virtually no packaging or transportation cost. Very little human intervention is required....
So are the music companies colluding? Maybe. Or maybe they are just exploiting the dumbness of their customers... These companies are large enough to **define** the market. They don't have to answer to supply & demand. The real crime is that the public puts up with this and asks for more...
Does anyone remember how buying home VHS/DVD movies used to be expensive? $15-$20 US for a single movie? Lately, Wal-Mart has a huge crate in their electronics dept, filled with DVDs for ~$5-$7 each... (*renting* at blockbuster costs almost that much ~$4). When displayed like that, I realize how stilly this whole $$$ for IP thing really is... But when displayed neatly in nice packaging on a shelf, these videos somehow appear [to the public] to merit their price...
Some might say the $5-$7 movies are crap... Well, what are most of downloadable songs selling for $0.99 EACH??? And movies cost far far more to produce than music...
Come to think of it, the DOJ antitrust investigations really aren't what they used to be at all. When they smacked down IBM, they put the fear of God into the company! For decades after that IBM bent over backwards to obey the terms of their agreement with the department. Ever since then though, it seems like all the companies that get investigated and found guilty of anti-competitive behavior just shrug it off and keep doing what they were doing before.
I don't know when exactly the DOJ lost the ability to scare the living hell out of a company like they did with IBM, but I think they need to get that ability back. Otherwise they're just wasting my tax dollars. I think the best way to do that is to make a particularly brutal example of the next company they investigate. What? You say it's the music industry? Well... OK then! Get to it, guys!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
"Fu*K You!" they all vote democrat anyway..
The only way to bust a doper--is when you yourself become a smoker!
This may be legitimate. Remember, Bush owns an ipod. Maybe he is pissed about the price and sent Gonzales down to lay the smack down. He may have no clue how to run the country and have no clue how to work his ipod either, but he gets things done when he's angry. "It costs what?!" "They're enemy combatants. round 'em up. Send 'em to Gitmo." "God Bless America". I think that's exactly how it went down.
Because Digg certainly never has dupes! (gag)
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
The common accepted price for CDs is about $10.
...and that's not going to happen. Big retailers don't want ot rely on other folks for prompt inventory fixes. They do beetter by buying a couple of hundred thousand copies of a CD for a little bit less per copy, then shipping it to their own distribution centers and rerouting it to their stores.
When I go see local bands, they sell their CDs in the clubs for about $10 a pop.
"I don't buy two more doublings from there to the stores."
Then you don't know how business works. People need to make profit, and that includes things like making more on the popular CDs so you don't go out of business when you get stuck with a million dollars or so of crappys titles.
"someone's going to come in and buy from the distributor and ship directly to their stores,"
All your model does is move the middleman over to the "middleman" of the warehouses of places like Best Buy and Target. Which is why you get new Cds for $10 at those places...
I thought the music industry wanted variable pricing for music, and it was Apple that wanted to keep prices fixed at $0.99/song.
Vote for Pedro
So our great benefactor, Steve Jobs, is here to "protect consumers"? Get real and pull your fanboy head out of his ass. Clearly he wants to sell songs and iPods, and he's not going to do that at more than .99/song because at that point people would just start buying CDs again (or pirating more music). Which is exactly what the industry wants (not the pirating part). He's not protecting you; he's protecting himself. And when the time comes that your interests don't coincide with his own, he will sell you out faster than you can say "OMGZ it comes in white!!!"
The common accepted price for CDs is about $10.
... and the cheapest are "royalty free" movies, on more expensive media.
The common accepted price for many products is artificially maintained. Your musicians have a completely different price structure to labels, and yet they sell in the same range, because they can, because that's the accepted price. Same reason a "CD" from iTMS costs "about $10".
Many of the components of that $2.50 you started with are independant of the material on it, and the same whether they're CDs or DVDs or computer software (commercial, freeware, or shareware). The distribution and production is the same, no matter what you put on them. And yet some of these have "common accepted prices" of $5.00, of $10.00, of $20.00,
People need to make profit, and that includes things like making more on the popular CDs so you don't go out of business when you get stuck with a million dollars or so of crappys titles.
Indeed, when the demand's high, you can charge more. We're not talking about charging more for popular CDs, and we're not talking about why they engage in price fixing, or even whether they should or shouldn't. We're just talking about how it happens, and the overly complex distribution mechanism is part of it.
All your model does is move the middleman over to the "middleman" of the warehouses of places like Best Buy and Target.
Their warehousing costs aren't $7.50 per item or they'd go out of business... most of their products cost less than that, and their margins aren't 300% or they'd be undersold. Like Apple, they negotiate with the labels for what they get to buy and sell stuff for, and they get to buy stuff at a price that lets them sell for the price the labels want them to sell it at. If they undercut them too much, they wouldn't get to start that high on the distribution chain.
That very well may be how Bush's little token scene played out, after Condi told him it costs $50 per song. After he told that stuff to Abu Gonzales, the Grand Inquisitor acted on those orders, fulfilling his earlier memo to Cheney that "we need a Pearl Harbor type event to kidnap the media moguls who don't just run the videos we make at the DoD Press Simulation Center".
--
make install -not war
Don't worry about the music industry...They're connected with the Mob. Either the AG will find them innocent, and through the constitutional provision against re-trial, prevent any future actions...or he will be assasinated by the RIAA / MPAA / BSA thugs.
I suspect that the bribes have already been sent.
Andy Out!
Look at today's AT&T article... AT&T was split into pieces for being the most abusive monopoly since Standard Oil.. Now, AT&T is recombining itself with its former pieces to form the same thing.
It's unlikely that AT&T will return to its former "glory" with the competition it now has, but it still shows the current administration's complete indifference towards abuse by megacompanies.
Melissa
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
The agreement to purchase x CDs at full price over the course of the year. Those prices are higher than retail. Oh, they often have sales, but sale discs don't go towards filling your purchase quota. They aren't losing money. They've been around too long.
jred
I'm not a mechanic but I play one in my garage...
The prices have to be high to combat piracy.
Yes that's it.
It worked last time.
Actually, my "quota" was filled several years ago.
And to answer your next question, the sale disks go towards "free" disks.
I've only ever purchased 4 disks at full price ($16). The rest have been at $7, plus I still have 10 free ones available to me.
I'm not really cheerleading for Sony/BMG, I only brought the whole thing up to show that the myth that companies would lose money selling CD's at less than $10 is not demonstrated by the fact that Sony/BMG routinely sells CD's at around $7 shipped to customers.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Kiwi talk about something else?
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
You're comparing a single, which has all the physical overhead of an album, with a digital download that has no overhead. You're comparing prices 25 years ago with prices today ... there's been a massive reduction in the price of anything that can be digitised.
25 years ago a videodisc of Star Wars would have cost at least $35.00... that's typical for a single-disc release. Allowing for inflation that's what, $70? Today you can get that on DVD for $20. And a DVD of the top grossing film for 2004 (Shrek 2) is less than that.
$0.99 isn't "cheap".
I don't know how capitalism = "screwing the customer".
In any basic business or marketing class you are first taught that a transaction only takes place when BOTH parties agree that there is a net gain to themselves. In otherwords the seller only sells if there is a benefit to him, and the buyer only buys if there is benefit to himself.
But remember the music industry isn't 100% based on capitalism because they have a government granted monolopy thus they can charge practically whatever they want since they control the (legal) supply of product.
In true capitalism, if you continue to "screw the customers" you don't stay in business very long.
Libertas in infinitum