What's a fair price for a CD or download ?

What's a fair price for 

- a high quality album download

- a CD 

- a concert ticket (small venue) 

?

You tell me, folks ! 

 

I think a concert ticket depends on the venue and its size ... however, generally speaking, many folks take a percentage, rather than a set number, because a set number on a hall of 1200 is probably going to make the tickets so spendy that the ability to sell tickets might become prohibitive.

 

The DT thing is a special edition for fans ... I don't remember it stating that it was a regular release. Please ensure that your information is correct on this, because I did read their would be a special edition of the new which was to have a book and other goodies. I might not be totally correct here, but I remember reading something like this. 

 

The $7 to $8 dollars seems fair to me. What distorts that is the individual "songs" and their price.

 

I still buy the CD's ... I like the art in it and the information. Music, STILL, is not an "invisible" part of my life where it won't matter the name who does it and you will not remember many of the songs a few years from now, because you only heard one and not the "artist" or the "album".

Your earnings potential has increased disproportionally because it is likely you are not doing the same job you were back in 1981. Using retail price inflation since 1981 the actual multiplier is around 2.84 from 1981 and 4.13 from 1979 (UK economy was in a high-inflation mess between 1979 and 1981) so your £3 in 1979 is the equivalent of £15.40 today.

So basically, despite format changes and several price-war battles that have occurred over the past 30 years, the Recommended Retail Price of albums has tracked inflation and the equivalent price has remained static, however, the actual (discounted) retail price has dropped considerably. The prices we now pay on Amazon or in the few remaining High Street retailers where you can buy CDs are discount prices, not manufacturers' recommended retail prices. (RRP on albums was scrapped in 2000 after legal ranglings between the Federal Trade Commission and the major labels).

The magic price of £9.99 (or $9.99 in the USA) at first appears to be a consumer set pricing, in that it seems to be maximum price the consumer is willing to pay for an album, however this price was actually set in the 1990s by supermarkets selling top-40 albums at just above cost-price (35% retail mark-up on albums means that an album with an RRP of £12.99 had a cost-price of £9.62, leaving 37p profit for the retailer, which in fine for top-40 albums when you can shift millions of the them each week). Once this price-point had been ingrained in the consumer the record stores had to follow to stay in business ... and as we now know few of them actually did with many of them seeing a marked decline in revenue long before downloading became an issue. Brick'n'mortar record stores couldn't make a living out of selling non-top-40 albums alone, they needed the revenue from the high-selling albums to stay profitable and there they were in direct competition from the supermarkets. I was in HMV Basingstoke yesterday and to be honest, apart from the admittedly impressive rack of vinyl albums (each stickered at £20 or more), it was a depressing sight of block-buster DVDs and non-music tat.

Amazon can make money out of selling non-top-40 albums because it is global and does not have chains of costly retail outlets, and as we have seen, the internet can only support one "Amazon" type retailer; even traditional retailers like HMV and Virgin and other online retailers such as CDNow could not compete once Amazon had established itself as the go-to place for music. CDBaby and their like survive because they are niche, but they are also very small by comparison. It could be argued that vinyl sales are a niche market that Amazon thus far has failed to capitalise on because (let's be honest here) it is a tactile product that leads to impulse buying, which is why HMV Basingstoke can stock so much of it. (Having said that, I walked out of HMV with a £9.99 CD of DBowie's Blackstar instead of the £23.99 LP because I couldn't justify to myself the extra £14 spend)

CD pricing is now a mix of "damned if you do and damned if you don't" and "monkey see, monkey do" regardless of the quality or desirability of the product being offered. The magic 9.99 price-point is something that even small producers have to live by because the consumer has come to accept (not "dictate") that pricing as the norm. Personally, I don't buy into the "it's what the consumer is willing to spend" argument, if everyone sold albums for £20 then everyone would pay £20 just like any other retail product, if we want it we will pay the price charged (re: LP sales). It is rare to the point of mythical that prices of non-essential items are consumer-driven.

In other threads (i.e. here) I have detailed how much it cost for a small producer to manufacture a batch of CDs), and to that we have to add in recording and production costs which can be anything from zero to whatever, but this ignores the value of the content, (i.e. what the IP is worth to the consumer). With downloads you are essentially paying for the IP plus the recording costs since there are no manufacturing costs, but even here the pricing is a mess and is based upon what the "industry" expects the consumer will pay rather than on what the content is actually worth.