There's still going to be quite a few costs - staffing at the download site, the record label costs, aggregators acting as middle men between the label and the download sites. And hopefully a bit to go to the artists ;-) While the costs are lower, the earnings are far lower as well.
Leaving aside the debate about what the 'real' value of music is, a single track tends to cost £1 to £1.50, and you're getting 10 or so for 7 quid, it's not all that bad really. Download sales are gradually going up, as people are becoming more willing to pay a quid for a track here and there.
It gets really stupid when there's things like a mate who went to buy the Stereo:Type album from Beatport. Meant to cost £9, but to buy the WAVs, it costs £26. Wrong again... there's no way that's £17 worth of bandwidth.
I'm with you that they should give the option to merge the physical and digital sales... the only reason you should have to pay for the same thing twice is if you want two of the fuckers. They could also do more to make paying for downloads more appealing - maybe including merchandise with a purchase or cheaper gig entry.
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Date: 2009-02-24 07:27 pm (UTC)Leaving aside the debate about what the 'real' value of music is, a single track tends to cost £1 to £1.50, and you're getting 10 or so for 7 quid, it's not all that bad really. Download sales are gradually going up, as people are becoming more willing to pay a quid for a track here and there.
It gets really stupid when there's things like a mate who went to buy the Stereo:Type album from Beatport. Meant to cost £9, but to buy the WAVs, it costs £26. Wrong again... there's no way that's £17 worth of bandwidth.
I'm with you that they should give the option to merge the physical and digital sales... the only reason you should have to pay for the same thing twice is if you want two of the fuckers. They could also do more to make paying for downloads more appealing - maybe including merchandise with a purchase or cheaper gig entry.