Interesting survey on the music industry:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060202/..._music_ap_poll
Highlights:
Eighty percent of the respondents consider it stealing to download music for free without the copyright holder's permission, and 92 percent say they've never done it, according to the poll conducted for The Associated Press and Rolling Stone magazine.
Meanwhile, three-quarters of music fans say compact discs are too expensive, and 58 percent say music in general is getting worse.
The article also notes that CD sales continue to slide:
A total of 618.9 million CD albums were sold during 2005, sharply down from the 762.8 million sold in 2001, according to Nielsen Soundscan.
At the same time, 352.7 million tracks were sold digitally in 2005, a category that wasn't even measured five years ago. Digital sales of music and ring tones offer new revenue opportunities, but often at the expense of more lucrative CD sales.
To me it's clear that the music industry is
still waaaay behind the curve. File sharing, MP3s, and iPods are not new, but they are reaching a point where they are really sinking in, and the more they do, the more the culture of music consumption is irreversibly changed.
Music should be a high-volume, low-cost, commodity biz--yet labels and retailers cling to the absurd notion that a CD should cost $18.95. Simple math tells you that if an iPod holds 10,000 songs, then ~$1.90 per song is an order of magnitude too expensive. Even iTunes $.99 per song is too expensive.
Think about it. Would you spend more total $ on music if each song was $1.90, $0.99, or $0.19? I would definitely start buying music again if it cost $0.19 for a single. In fact, I would constantly have a stream of new music in my iPod. I would be much more likely to explore new music and try genres I'm not familiar with. I would take many more chances on bands I hadn't heard of or had only read about.
As it stands now, I buy maybe five CDs per year, simply because they're not worth it and I know I'm getting ripped off.
What do you think?