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Napster Being Shut Down
helix2301 writes "Napster was one of the earliest and most popular P2P music-sharing services. After a long legal battle that saw Napster slowly gutted in the face of infringement lawsuits, it was reinvented as a legitimate music download service. The resurrected Napster is now being shut down. Rhapsody has completed its purchase of Napster and will be absorbing its subscribers and assets."
Emphasis on 'reasonable per-song price'. I'm sorry, $2 is not reasonable. $1 is not reasonable in my mind. Knock it down to 25 cents or so, and I'm sure they'll see sales skyrocket. Right now there's a ton of torrenting, because people don't WANT to pay CD prices for something non-physical for a best-of album or whatever. Of course, many people will always torrent for free regardless, so those people can be removed from these equations since they'd never purchase the song no matter what... no lost sales with them one way or another.
But the prices they currently have are literally equivelant to buying a CD if you buy every track. Or higher priced. Serious to god, there's zero post production CD stamping, zero (for all intents and purposes, ignoring of course electricity needed to copy 6 megs of data, etc) cost to creating multiple copies. Why am I paying the same price as it was to get a plastic CD case, printed album art (multiple pages typically), and the physical CD? The cost of ALL of that is gone, except perhaps the initial outlay of the cover art which is usually embedded in the mp3 for some stupid reason). Without all that, the price should be... y'know... lower.
But that'd be asking them to be reasonable.
Now I'm not unreasonable. I'm not one of the ones who thinks all mp3s should be free. It'd be nice, but I'm not a dreamer like that.
But it's give and take. You can't have all the money, and we get none of the added benefits we used to have (case, album art, cd, etc). Drop the price, I'll start buying.
Until such time, screw you, you're just losing my sale by being unreasonable.
And I'm not one to think the band should get zero money either for their work. That's why 99% of their money should come from their day job, aka: playing live shows. I went to a concert a few weeks ago, bought a shirt and some pins, and even donated some extra money to the band's tip box type thing (since it's somewhat rare for them to be able to tour abroad, I help out how I can). But they actually TOUR for their money. Never mind getting free money for the rest of your and your children's lives because of one good CD in the 70's or whatever.