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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Not-much-$ is still better than none-$-at-all. It's not exactly the choice of Spotify vs. buy a CD in shop, it's a choice between Spotify and BitTorrent.

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It is a choice between buy a CD in a shop, itunes, or Spotify. Especially if you pay for spotify, why pay again for the same music?

That does not make it the correct price. The correct price pays back the production cost (including paying for the time and creativity of the artist in making up the song) and adds some profit. Get that from volume or high price but low price is not correct price.

The correct price is what consumers are willing to pay for not what you think your profit margin should be.

Unless you want to see the product disappear from the market, the "correct" price must also compensate the production costs and provide for a little profit for the author. Thanks to digital piracy the price many customers are willing to pay falls far short of that mark. If stealing physical goods was as easy as stealing digital goods you'd see the "correct" price of a car far fall below what it costs to make it too.

Except I have a plethora of buying cars and plenty of dealers willing to take my money. In the digital space a considerable amount of piracy is due to no legally available outlet for purchase of digital goods in a manner commiserate with what users want. Look at the success of iTunes and spotify as filling consumer needs. Besides if the price consumers are willing to pay for your product does not cover its production costs then you have no market (i.e. product)

You appear to be using your own definition.

Correct pricing, in an economic sense, is that which an undistorted market will bear, using whatever definition of "undistorted" you like. It's that simple.

> using whatever definition of "undistorted" you like

My definition includes the absence of violence, threats of violence, or dishonesty.

If the only reason people aren't using BitTorrent downloads is threats of violence (which is what threats of internet disconnection are, albeit at several levels removed), then it isn't a free/undistorted market.

> The correct price pays back the production cost (including paying for the time and creativity of the artist in making up the song) and adds some profit.

So if I wrote a program, say an iPhone app, using lots of time and creativity, but no-one wanted to buy it, do you think I should get paid for it anyway? If so, where would the money come from?

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