blue;150255 Wrote: > ... in a free market ...Of course it's not a free market in the sense of a > perfectly competitive one. It's a market of monopolistic competition. For people who buy CDs, there are no close substitutes for their favorite bands. Accordingly, the sellers can extract some monopoly rents. This, I believe, is enough to account for your observation that prices don't track production costs. (But also, there are a lot of costs besides manufacturing that probably haven't gone down.) But then, I think, the heroes are the almost-as-good bands, not the people who "liberate" the stars' product.
As to the price of downloads compared to CDs, I think the key is that most people don't want most songs on most CDs. Yes, $12 for downloading 12 songs compares unfavorably in many ways to a $12 CD. But if you want 3 songs (or 1), your choices are 3 downloads for $3 or $12 for a disc, a box, and some "bonus material." In this sense the suits are in fact selling tracks for less than they have ever sold them for before. Even 45 rpm singles used to sell for close to a 1960 dollar (for much the same reason), if I remember right, which is close to the price of a CD in real terms. -- tom permutt ------------------------------------------------------------------------ tom permutt's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=1893 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=28858 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
