Replies to post #105135 on Zeev's Turnips Patch-No Politics (ZEEV)

[Public Heel]

I hope he's right. By the time they get around to making it PC-compatible, it'll cost less...

[Tenchu]

Zeev, Typically, a CD will sell for less than $10 and will have 8 to 12 songs, so he thinks that the pricing, even if there were no free sites, is excessive.

CDs must be cheaper where you live. Just over the weekend, I picked up the latest J.Lo CD for $15 plus CA state sales tax. It has 12 songs on it, so getting it via iTunes would be a good deal, even if I wanted all of the songs (which I don't). Of course, I wouldn't get the jewel case and printed CD insert, but that's just collectable stuff.

That leaves the question of free music, which as usual affects the entire recording industry, not just iTunes. But consider that even with all the free music available, CDs are still selling. Add the user-friendly interface that Apple is good at, and you've got a service that I'm sure many people will indeed pay for.

Tenchu

[ajtj99]

If they were smart, they'd charge a dime or a nickel a song and let folks put it on pay-pal. If they offered high quality, they might get some folks buying into it. Some of the rips on free swap sites are just horrible.

I buy CD's, as the MP3 format just rots my ears. Even CD's are sometimes tough to listen to, as the digital encoding and digital delivery takes much of the life out of the recording. It's like tin when you finally hear it.

I'm just a wee bit pickier than most.

[mlsoft]

Zeev...

I have long thought that the future of music in the home will eventually be a dedicated computer (part of your audio system) that stores all your CD's on its hard drive(s) and lets you select the cuts you want to hear either by CD or by single cuts. The quality of your music computer would vary just as the quality of current CD players/transports vary now, from basic to near audiophile. The computer would have to have a large amount of storage, and be capable of storing exactly all the data on a good quality CD and handling the oversampling detail that a high end CD player/transport does now, which is hardly the case of an MP3 player.

I am surprised that such a computer system is not offered already.

mlsoft

[langostino]

Zeev - cost of music

Someone asked why people would pay for digital music downloads if they could get them for free. Leaving aside the issues of quality and time (ease of location, etc), there's the basic concept of "free". Most people don't like being criminals. There are lots of things one can get for "free" if one is willing to steal them. From salt and pepper shakers at Dennys to music to software ...

The biggest reason people will pay for digital content is because they would rather not resort to being thieves.

As for what price people will be willing to pay, the market will determine that. PressPlay, MusicNet, Rhapsody and now Apple have all set initial pricing where they think it will work. The market then will dictate where it moves from there.

Ironic that buying a record for $10 today is actually less in inflation adjusted dollars than what people paid 25 years ago, yet in a nation filled with a growing sense of entitlement everyone wants everything "cheaper".

I would suggest your son might not be a fully accurate reflection of where the market for music develops in the coming 3-5 years. I assume eventually he'll make friends with someone in a business that relies on intellectual property and come to have a different sense of what's "free" and what's "stealing". I predict there will be a gradual change in behavior. Gradual being the operative word. :-)