Quote:
Originally Posted by Catlady
Are you claiming that music piracy has affected the price of a Broadway show versus the price of an original cast album? If you are, I'd like to know what evidence you have for that claim.
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As far as the basic facts of the pricing trend, my recent evidence comes from partly from memory (paid $8.99 - $2.00 Amazon MP3 credit for Book of Mormon), but I also checked the current Book of Mormon box office ticket prices. My older data points come from
The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway (1969).
As for whether the relation is cause vs. effect, I'm not saying it's proven the way it's proven that smoking causes lung cancer. But it certainly makes sense given basic economics. If music is available for a price of zero plus a tiny risk premium, copyright holders are going to have to price low to sell at all.
Now, I don't claim the possibility of making home copies of the album is the only reason for broadway prices rising quicker than inflation. Another reason is that New York is a more prosperous city than it used to be. So I think you'll find similar price trends for the road shows, just not as extreme.
I just thought of a way to test my pricing hypothesis that I haven't done. If I am right, the prices of broadway non-musicals should have risen slower, since the late sixties, than the price of broadway musicals. Feel free to check.