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I agree, something else to consider. What can you do with it once you down load it?? If you think that's bad what about ringtones? they are even more expensive.

# posted by Anonymous 5:05 AM

And this is why I continue to read your blog despite a lot of the detritus that is posted.
You have hit the nail on the head here and this is why I have not, and will not buy music online. If I could actually purchase a 320kbit MP3 that I could do what I want with or perhaps FLAC files I would buy like crazy.
In fact I would probably pay $1 each even! Now I would like to pay less, but I would go ahead and pay more and never touch a CD again.
This BS with not being able to even purchase a high quality file and then adding injury to insult you can't even move it from device to device as you choose it ourageous.
For $1/song that means that an artist could surely get 10-15 cents because of low overhead. If the seller gets a similar amount and the record company gets the rest it will more than pay for all thier expensive studios and fat cat executives. It will even fund thier efforts to sue thier customers who don't really do what they want ;).

# posted by Anonymous 7:46 AM

Why would/should you pay a $1 per song on a download? With all, or most of, the overhead cost gone for a download how about .50 a song? The whole CD should cost around 6 or 7 dollars.

RAINMAN

# posted by Anonymous 7:54 AM

Have any of you tried AllofMP3? You can get songs in whatever format you want (they'll do it on the fly!) and they have very good bandwidths. They also have a vast collection. But the best argument in their favour is that they charge 1c per MB of download, which in my opinion, is the best model for online music downloads.

# posted by abhijit 8:35 AM

Actually, all I was looking for was "Where the Streets Have No Name". All the rest of U2 isn't my cup of tea. Having said that, I'll just go to iTunes and buy that one song in particular for 99 cents rather than buying a whole album for one song.

# posted by leon 9:22 AM

Hey, Todd... What do you mean we have parts of dead organisms and cast-off fragments and wastes of living organisms? I use Head 'n' Shoulders! (Dn't you understand technology? Study it for to long and you go nuts. Once nuts you can either joke about it or get real surly and snotty. PCs et al. are not a lifestyle.)

Leon, you're quite correct. If you just want one or two tunes from a group then you're okay paying the price. Many people go get the entire album, unfortunately.

abhijit - I'll go check them out. Thanks.

Rainman - I'm more in favor of a $0.70 cap as being fair.

# posted by Bill 10:42 AM

This is EXACTLY why I will not buy online music. They charge the same or more for songs that are already encoded into low-quality mp3's or some other format that I can't use however I want (like the 5 devices rule for iTunes I believe) and I don't even get the CD jacket or anything to boot! I'm *much* better off buying the whole CD. I've also found that I like a lot of songs that I'd never had heard before if I hadn't bought the entire CD instead of just downloading songs.

# posted by David 10:36 PM

abhijit - checked out the site. Without meaning to cast aspersions and expressing only my usual level of cynicism, I think I'd have trouble dealing with a website that wants me to leave money on deposit and which is run by Russians. Although I lived in Manhattan, not Brooklyn, when I lived in New York, I heard far too many stories to make me feel comfortable. Disclaimer: This is a personal opinion. It is not meant as advice. You should always reach your own conclusion based on careful research when dealing with any vendor's site online or off.

# posted by Bill 9:14 AM

Here, here, I second this point!

iTunes, Napster, et. al. are a complete ripoff designed for consumers too into their portable devices to notice.

Try this on for size: Second Spin (www.secondspin.com) currently has 9 copies of the limited edition 2CD version of your U2 disc - that's 29 songs for $17.99, roughly $0.80/song. For that you get physical media, and the right to burn it to whatever you want to: mp3, wav, whatever. I don't have idiotTunes, but I am guessing they are not selling that baby for that cheap. Also, record companies sell off their back catalog stuff for deep discounts all the time -that's how I got most of my great "old" stuff (70's, 80's) for less than $9/CD new. I like to rip these CD's onto my hard drive, then sell them back at $2 - $3 per CD to a used record store near my home for a net cost of less that $0.50/song.

And think if someone smart was actually trying this. They'd get this stuff, legally, for almost nothing, I would think.

# posted by Anonymous 11:37 AM

You can also get cheap CD's imported from Canada. Go to Amazon and choose to buy it from a person or other company instead of Amazon. When you go to the "new" section, you'll find some great prices. I'm talking like $7-$9 for brand-new CD's still shrink-wrapped. Most of the companies selling these import them from Canada I think which, for some reason, allows them to sell them at a much lower price than normal (we've been importing drugs...now we're importing CD's too :-P). I've noticed a lot of them are from the Niagra Falls area of NY state.

# posted by David 3:49 PM

What a wonderful thread - I thought I was the only one who had noticed this...

What Big Music has failed to realize is that mass-market-music has become essentially commoditized - most of the so-called "artists" are more accurately described as "entertainers". They have also failed to realized that the average consumer has seen through their shell game and is becoming increasingly unwilling to pay $15-20 for a CD containing two or three decent tunes and a whole load of filler.

Also, why is it that a CD costs about the same as a DVD, given that the latter generally costs at least ten times as much to develop?

The death of the single has meant that there is no market for individual songs. The rise of the computer has made music easily copyable and the internet has made it transportable - yet Big Music looks back longingly at their profits of bygone years and tries to tell us with a straight face that piracy is the problem and lawsuits and DRM are the solutions.

The industry-preferred rate of $1 per song is way too high for me, particularly considering the "lockdown" nature of DRM. I would pay 50c to 75c for a high-quality digital copy of a song that I could do with as I pleased. Start putting DRM restrictions on what I can do with it and the amount I am prepared to pay drops to 25c per track.

It's time that Big Music wakes up and realizes that the good old days of mediocre products and vast profits are over. Their bloated business practices cannot last long as people turn to alternative means of procuring music. Until they get with the program I will keep doing what I am doing - buying used CDs for $5-$7 apiece and repurposing them as I see fit...

# posted by Wizard Prang 8:18 AM

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