Music downloads still too expensive

[webby]

Since the introduction of the mac app store, many apps are cheaper to buy and download than their packaged versions. For instance, Aperture is downloadable for £45 while the packaged version is £173! iWork is £32 as opposed to £72.

So why then is music still 7.99-9.99 to download for a lossy version when the cd is either the same price or cheaper if you shop around online?

Personally, I think a lossless download should be £7 and lossy £4. There's no packaging, no delivery costs, no storage costs, no printing costs..... Hardly any overheads at all really.

I'm still buying CDs.

[WAD62]

Since the introduction of the mac app store, many apps are cheaper to buy and download than their packaged versions. For instance, Aperture is downloadable for £45 while the packaged version is £173! iWork is £32 as opposed to £72.

So why then is music still 7.99-9.99 to download for a lossy version when the cd is either the same price or cheaper if you shop around online?

Personally, I think a lossless download should be £7 and lossy £4. There's no packaging, no delivery costs, no storage costs, no printing costs..... Hardly any overheads at all really.

I'm still buying CDs.

The Arcade Fire recently released their last album on FLAC for £3.99, which is about the first time anyone has hit a reasonable price.

My stupid mate bought the last Spiritualized album on mp3 (only 256k fixed rate!!!) for £6.99, I bought the delux CD for £4.50!!!!

The last Radiohead album was available in FLAC from their website for £7.99, the CD was only £7...Oh which shall I buy I wonder

Just buy the CD and rip it (about 3 mins work), at the moment it's cheaper, more widely available, gives a natural backup, and you get the artwork too

Itunes and Amazon are exploiting the public's ignorance...IMHO

[lovejoy]

In real terms, buying music generally is cheaper than it has ever been. I was rooting through my record collection a while back and found the original price sticker on my copy of A-ha's 'Hunting high and low' (I was only 13 at the time ;-). The price was just shy of £7 and this was around 25 years ago, so if you take inflation into account, then albums are pretty cheap these days.

I completely agree with your point, but looking at it from the sales point of view the pricing is nothing to do with packaging and logistics and everything to do with perceived value. The record companies are selling you the convenience of buying an album without ever leaving your armchair or having to get up to answer the door to the postman. They're also selling 'have your album RIGHT NOW (download speed permitting). They're also selling the fact that there's no need to spend the time ripping that pesky CD (which by the way takes up space in your house) so that you can listen to it on your iPod. To a lot of people, this is worth a lot more than having a CD, so why would the record companies/iTunes etc. want to eat into their profit margins by devaluing their online product?

For the likes of us who like artwork, and physical media and uncompressed audio, well, we're a niche market and they're not particularly interested in us - unless of course they can sell us the 'premium vinyl' copy.

[Tim]

Porcupine Tree have been selling FLAC files of their work for sometime now, complete with downloadable artwork and they are always cheaper than the physical CD They also had some out of print titles available as FLAC too, but I haven't checked their site for awhile.

[dave2010]

There is also the possibility of buying only one or two tracks from a CD, which can work out cheaper. However, most of the download sites play tricks, such as ensure that the one item on the CD which you really want requires you to download the whole album. Also one suspects a certain degree of collusion, as if (say) a site has movements 1-3 of a symphony, and movement 4 requires a full album download, then it might be impossible to find any download site which will allow that movement to be downloaded in isolation.

There was one CD I bought which contained Thomas Tallis' nine tunes for Archbishop Parker's Psalter, where one download site had each of these as a separate track (some CDs put them all together on one track). The CD was under £5 (on offer?), while the download of the whole caboodle was over £20!
Probably this one - http://www.prestoclassical.co.uk/r/Portrait/PCL2101 not sure if I got it on one or 2 CDs - but that was the performance!

I usually buy the CDs, though some may find that the extra cost of storage (I have quite a lot of IKEA CD shelves) and the space used up may also count against them.

Occasionally the downloads are a lot cheaper or the only way to get works- e.g http://www.amazon.co.uk/Glazunov-The.../dp/B001NE5JOE

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sibelius-Com...sim_dmusic_a_1

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tchaikovsky-...sim_dmusic_a_5

Occasionally download sites have bargains - e.g Terry Riley's In C which I got for under £1, but not at that price now. I also bought a download of Glazunov symphonies conducted by Tadaaki Otaka with the BBC NOW orchestra from HMV at a low price, but I don't think it's that price now.

and there are sites such as Classical Music Mobile which have older recordings for 1 Euro each - some are good. http://www.classicalmusicmobile.com/

There's a thread for bargains (mostly classical - but some modern stuff) at http://www.for3.org/forums/showthread.php?1061-Bargains

[dave2010]

PS: One use for download sites is if you need a piece in a hurry. I was once intending to play a CD to a music society, and cleaners came in and somehow one of the CDs got lost. I had an equivalent version (not the same one) downloaded and burned to CD in around 20 minutes, and everything went off OK. I never did find the original CD - presumably it's around somewhere, but that was quite a few years ago.

Very unlikely that the cleaners took it, though maybe they just threw it away!

[webby]

In real terms, buying music generally is cheaper than it has ever been. I was rooting through my record collection a while back and found the original price sticker on my copy of A-ha's 'Hunting high and low' (I was only 13 at the time ;-). The price was just shy of £7 and this was around 25 years ago, so if you take inflation into account, then albums are pretty cheap these days.

Oh I agree. I spend way less on (individual) CDs now than I did 20-25 years ago; they're cheaper than ever.

But my point was more that the downloads are too expensive for what you're getting, especially when compared with the physical version and also when you compare other digital media such as software and how that is delivered to the end user.

Of course, those who do download these lossy mp3s are being taken advantage of and probably don't realise that or even care.

[lovejoy]

I see where you're coming from but I don't see that people are being taken advantage of.

It's not like buying a chocolate bar where you're paying the same amount but only getting to enjoy a bar that's 1/3 of the size of what it was a few years ago. To 99.9% of the population, lossy MP3s sound exactly the same as their CDs do.

But we all still have the choice. Unlike chocolate bars. The few of us left who care take the old fashioned route.

[webby]

To use your analogy, it would be comparable if people we sold two chocolate bars but one with 70% cocoa, and one with 30% cocoa. Now, most wouldn't taste the difference, but you could argue that the one with less cocoa in it should cost less, regardless of the perceived differences.

[Bazil]

If you use itunes and an ipod I don't suppose there is any point buying a FLAC album.
Yes it can be converted but its really makes sense just to get the CD.