Of course you or I could do it for cheaper. But for someone without particular technical skills to contract to a good, reliable company, spec it out, and produce a solid product at market rates on a reasonable timeline? 32k seems about right.

Indeed. I thought the same thing, but I suspect he's including a design firm that tested out multiple versions of the site, backend infrastructure to handle potential load, support to handle issues in a timely manner should they come up, and maybe his personal time.

It seems pretty inexpensive to me. Designing a site where people can log in, pay actual currency for a file, and download it a few times is not trivial. We may be able to do stuff like this ourselves over the weekend, but Louie can't, and so he had to pay someone to do it. And when you pay for something like this you're paying for things like the company's reputation, support "forever", and the right to say things like "can you move that 1 pixel to the left"?

Why are all the downvotes on comments relating to the website cost? I thought it was pretty high as well when I read that, I mean sure you pay much more for peace of mind, but that's like a 100% markup. And the red on black text wasn't a great choice IMO.

design, e-commerce, login/registration, authorized downloads, streaming, social integration, CMS (I assume), probably analytics, and who knows what on the back-end.

A little on the high side, and possibly not using the latest and greatest platform(s), but I wouldn't say unreasonable.

Pay attention MySpace, because this is what you could have been: The go-to spot on the internet for artists who just want to pay some money for a personal website where they can put up their shit and sell it and not worry about the details.

Wonder if he is including the S3 costs in there?

For that price the design should look more modern. With even a $2000 design budget you could create a 3 page site that looked 10x better than that.

His site makes my eyes bleed.