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RE: Why is HiRes Download more expensive than physical disc ?

LPs were at $7-8 30 years ago (at the dawn of the CD). At that time you saw a spike to $13-15 with the new format, but if you take $8 and adjust for inflation your at $18.54 in 2015. So, music from an inflation perspective is not overpriced. Of course, few buy albums any longer, preferring to buy singles on mp3. So a more apt comparison might be to 45 singles in the 50s and 60s, but even there you got a B-side.

But that's where I'll stop defending music retail. Saying that distributing an album digitally is more expensive is complete BS. If it costs you more, then your doing something stupendously dumb. Whether your selling a physical disk or a download, you still need a website, you still have marketing costs. So what you're left with is the cost of goods sold, and worst case your cost to offer an album download is about 25c. Amazon CloudFront CDN costs 12c/GB. Other CDNs at scale will give you deals that are as little as 1/10th that.

This is really a case of what the market will bare. The music being released in HD digital are the same tired (albeit great) chestnuts that we've all bought on multiple formats already. Yeah, we just have to have Kind of Blue on yet another format at notionally higher quality because we're all a bunch of obsessive with disposable income to support this insanity.

Which does mean that the sales likely are low. Certainly producing jazz and classical is no route to riches, but I object to paying materially more for 24/96 vs. 16/44.1. Charge me for the differential in download and storage costs (although you only need one copy of a file on your CDN origin and that's pennies/month).

Sorry, but the current game with HD digital seems to be a money grab. And because the prices are out of line with iTunes or buying a CD from Amazon and ripping it, it's doomed to be a niche market. You want it to be more? You want the mass consumer to embrace HD digital? Then don't charge more for it. That's no way to create a market.



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  • RE: Why is HiRes Download more expensive than physical disc ? - lquam 21:12:56 05/07/15 (0)

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