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UMG To Price New CDs Under $10
marmoset writes "Perhaps a decade late, Universal Music Group has decided to try out sub-$10 CD pricing in the US. 'Beginning in the second quarter and continuing through most of the year, the company's Velocity program will test lower CD prices. Single CDs will have the suggested list prices of $10, $9, $8, $7 and $6.'" CD retailers are not convinced the price cuts will work out. For one thing it depends on whether other major labels follow suit, but the article notes that "executives at the other majors were nervous about the UMG move" and "privately, some appeared annoyed."
the article notes that "executives at the other majors were nervous about the UMG move" and "privately, some appeared annoyed."
You don't say. You mean to tell me that they might have to price their music competitively? That they might have to take a pay cut in order to compete in the market? That their 'silent agreement' of what all music should cost among the biggest labels is no more?
Music record contracts really annoy me in this respect. They are nothing but middlemen when it comes to publishing music. I understand their role in promoting and paying upfront cash for studio time but their role as publishers is leech at best.
If bands had the ability to pit manufacturers against each other in publishing their CDs and albums (and also if the band could decide what percentage they needed from sales) then we would see prices dramatically plummet. Look at CDBaby and think how inexpensive it could get if that kind of market was where we bought all our CDs. And in a capitalistic world, that's how it is supposed to work. But no, acts have contracts and the most popular acts love how the labels shove only those acts down our throats. The music industry is a sorry state right now and rarely do we hear news like this. At least UMG appears to be slowly realizing that it's adapt-or-die time.
My work here is dung.
You'd think the music companies would have at least one economist on staff who could explain to them, slowly and gently, that under certain circumstances it is actually possible to make more money when each individual unit is priced lower. It really takes some stubborn failure of logic to prioritise your sale price above your actual monetary returns.
Of course, it's also possible that the music quality will just decline to compensate for the drop in price.
Security through promiscuity is no better than security through obscurity.
Quickly followed by
"[Sales of CDs] which [are] down 15.4% so far this year. Album sales were down 18.2% last year, and 19.7% in 2008, "
I swear, Thick as a Brick should be a Jethro Tull song, not a description of record company executives....
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Try “rip it”.
Who burns CD's any more?
If the other music groups complain or retaliate in any way, doesn't that constitute illegal price fixing?
Audio CDs aren't quaint. They're reliable read-only long term storage media for losslessly encoded music. The data is unencumbered by DRM, you can lend CDs to your friends, you can sell CDs and you can listen to your CDs on as many devices as you like. I don't pay for downloads. I pay for CDs or get my music for free.
I don't even have to take the album out of its wrapper.
Yeah, that sounds really worth the extra money. I have barely any space to store my DVDs and blu-rays in my flat right now. I'm glad I could shove all my CDs into my mum's attic. I used to have some kind of sentimental attachment to them, but that starting going after Amazon began offering cheap MP3 albums, and completely evaporated last time I had to move flat. Storing and moving CDs and DVDs is a real pain - and records would be even worse in terms of space - not to mention more fragile. I don't see anything empowering about needing to keep highly inefficient backups of what is essentially just something you want to hear - not something you need to look at or touch.
which is totally what she said
Vinyl sales are rising because people are fools.
(There is some chance that the audio never experiences any filtering and the frequency response of the entire chain of analog equipment is such that there is no cutoff of high frequencies, and that the ears listening can hear the high frequencies, and that there isn't any dust on the record and that the record hasn't been worn by previous playback, but it isn't really all that likely)
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
If you find this concept quaint then why are vinyl sales slowly rising?
Because the dynamic range of vinyl albums can't be compressed as much as they are on a CD resulting in better sounding music?
Uh, that may be true, but it would also require that the overprocessed, overmodulated, autotuned, beatbox crap they're calling "music" these days be worth a shit to press onto vinyl. In most cases, vinyl is nothing more than turd polish.
Yet.
Former US House candidate, TN-5
I'd rather they assumed I shop-lifted it than I downloaded it... the penalties are less severe for shop-lifters.
Collector's Edition
True, with inflation the price of the CD has probably dropped somewhat since the early 80s. But compare that price drop with price drop of the CD player. I think you could argue that the savings in terms of reproduction costs, recording costs, packaging, etc. have not been passed on to the CD cost the way they were for the CD player. My first CD player had no features and cost >$500. I could buy one today that was a quarter of the size and a fifth of the price with LOTS of programming features and a remote control. The CD I buy today is cheaper to reproduce, cheaper to record, and cheaper to package (remember the big boxes they came in during the 80s?) but I don't pay a fifth of the price.