Quote:
Originally Posted by hidari
After PAYING HIGH prices in the 80's and 90's for OVERpriced CDS..It is a PLEASURE to see sales od CDs reducing by 8 percent of more a year. I hope some of the companies go the way of the Dodo bird.
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I think that CD sales are dropping for three reasons:
- Most music being put out today is especially banal
- New music distribution paradigms, like Apple's iTunes store, allow consumers to download and pay for only the songs they like, so they're not forced to buy a whole CD just to get the couple of songs they really like
- CDs being released by good artists are being ripped and redistributed widely
I'll ask another question: why is $14.95 or $17.95 or whatever too "high" of a price? Maybe it's higher than you want to pay, but that's the way the market works. If the consumer thinks that CDs cost too much, then sales go down. Companies respond by lowering their price, until they are selling as many CDs as they want at a price which is acceptable to both buyer and seller.
Something else to think about
: why is it that artists release albums instead of singles? In the 'old days' of records, artists would release an album, and then singles ('45s') would be released to get airplay for the album, to provide a source of music for jukeboxes, and to seed the market and create demand for the album. That model went away with the CD, although mini-CDs were tried (they didn't sell well, probably because they were too expensive, and consumers didn't want 4 or 5 songs, they wanted 1 or maybe 2 songs).
I think that the iTunes model has been transformative in that it lets consumers pick, and pay for, only the music they want, instead of having to purchase an entire CD to get the few songs they want. As the iPod's popularity has grown, there is no reason to buy CDs anymore; people make their own playlists from a variety of artists' works to produce what
they want instead of what the CD producer wants them to buy.
I don't see this happening successfully in the reading market. Companies have tried to sell selected content, e.g., the New York Times setting a per-article price, but haven't been successful. IMO it's because news is no longer unique, and neither is news opinion. We have the WWW and blogs to thank for this! And, selling a single chapter out of a book makes no sense either. However, Amazon's allowing Kindle owners to download sample chapters in order to build interest in a book does work, in much the same way as listening to a single on the radio builds interest in an album.