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Comment by rwhitman | Hacker News Reader

I do, kinda. Lets just say that I haven't paid for music in quite some time.. and when I did it was always CDs, I've bought maybe one album digitally.

Its not the idea of paying that bothers me so much as the price point. I know damn well there's nowhere near the overhead costs to digital distribution that there are to printing, publishing and retail, why am I only getting a $5.00 discount? Popular digital books and MP3 albums could cost $2 and still be profitable...

Not to mention that I can't resell or exchange the digital copies like I could physical media, so there's no longterm value. If you consume as much media as I do you'll quickly go broke if you were to pay what they wanted, and not be able to at least recoup some of the value in tradeins.

$9.00+ for digital DRMed media is a total ripoff.

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> "I know damn well there's nowhere near the overhead costs to digital distribution that there are to printing, publishing and retail"

I dislike this argument - it assumes that products ought to be priced according to their cost of production, which is patently false in reality. The price of a product is whatever the market will bear.

Does this means MP3s aren't overpriced? Nope. The monopolistic cartel-like behavior of the labels does seem to prevent the market from reaching a natural equilibrium price for music; that being said, the notion that digital things should be almost-free because they're almost-free to produce IMHO is BS.

> "$9.00+ for digital DRMed media is a total ripoff."

None of the major digital music stores have been DRMed for a long time. Both iTunes and Amazon MP3 are DRM free, and in fact the only real place you'll find DRM on music these days is the Zune Store - but that's more because you're on a all-you-can-listen subscription plan, there's no confusion about whether or not you own your files.

The Zune store also sells straight-up, no DRM mp3s for about the same price Amazon does.

With the price fixing the only competition in town is priced at free. Therefore the market should bear somewhere between $10 and free. But not $10. Its still a ripoff no matter what way you shake it. Competitively, paying to download something is purely for the convenience of not having to hunt down a free copy. So I'm paying not for the music, but the ease of downloading it instantly. And thats not worth $10 to me.

(Ok, so the music you buy doesn't have DRM, that is true. But its still worth absolutely nothing after you download it...)

There are two flaws in your argument. First, the price is no longer fixed, Apple took care of that. Granted, Amazon didn't give that option before, but they do now. Second, the market obviously would bear $10, which is why the Amazon Kindle store took off as it did. If the market wouldn't bear it, people would not have bought the Kindle and the books. Remember, Capitalism doesn't care what the fair price is, but what people are willing to pay.

> I know damn well there's nowhere near the overhead costs to digital distribution that there are to printing, publishing and retail, why am I only getting a $5.00 discount?

This isn't exactly true. Most of the 'overhead' of a CD isn't physical production, it's record labels. They give a band a lump of money to sign on, and then they bill the band at every opportunity. They charge you to use a recording studio, they charge you to hire a producer to make it sound the way they want, they charge you to hire an artist to do your covert art, they charge you to do the music video, etc. Once it's all done, they handle all the distribution as well, which has become relatively cheap thanks to economies of scale.

This is the same reason studios have always been against digital distribution. Once people realize how easy things can be, they'll realize that they, as an institution, are far less valuable. You don't need to get airplay on the radio if you can preview every song in an album, lend music to your friends wirelessly, etc.

The price of digital goods won't come down until we eliminate the actual overhead - the profiteering middlemen.

"Popular digital books and MP3 albums could cost $2 and still be profitable..."

Reproduction is a very small part of the cost of a book or album, as a share of the per-item price.

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