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Downloads are "better, faster, cheaper".

"A new universal method that allows manufacturers/retailers to profit from selling music content in hardware form. This method must also gain wide acceptance from consumers as to show substantial profits ie. > CD player sales and hardcopy CD's."


I don't believe this can happen. The economies don't permit it. Physical goods need a meat space supply chain and distribution network. The distribution network is likely to be hierarchical, with multiple levels of markup required to support inventory, which is a significant cost for commodities such as CDs where there are millions of separate titles. In addition there are production and shipping cost which are paid by some combination of the record label, the supply chain and the consumer.

Now contrast this with the situation with file transfer across the Internet. There are no inventory costs, other than the cost of storage space on the server for one copy of an album. (About 4 cents at the present Amazon cloud storage pricing.) The "production cost" is the CPU time required to drive the bandwidth. Typically with a hosting provider this is bundled in with "transport cost" which is the charge the hosting provider pays for Internet backbone service. The combined production and shipping costs are also around 4 cents for a 44/16 album download. (Again figuring this at the Amazon cloud storage pricing.) The customers get their product sooner and at lower cost. They don't have to take a trip to their mailbox or post office. They don't have to wait for days for mail to arrive. They don't have to drive or walk to a record store that happens to order the titles that interest them. They don't have to struggle with shrink wrap, rip the CD and scan the art work.
All they have to do is make a few mouse clicks for the purchase, and a few more to enter the resulting files into their music library. In addition, they can play long works or concerts non-stop, without being subject to an arbitrary time limit around 75 - 80 minutes. Hi-res albums are typically 3 to 6 times larger than 44/16, depending on download format. This translates into inventory and production/shipping costs of $0.12 to $0.24.

There are old farts who get a feeling of security holding a physical CD. (Obviously they haven't had many CD-Rs or pressed CDs go bad on them.) These people will die off.

Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar

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