Ken Durling wrote:
> That's right, but to begin with, half of it goes to the retailer. You
> can start calculating CD "profits" at more like $7.50 per.
This is incorrect, at least in the US. Retail markup on CDs is typically between
15% and 30%, depending on the release, the quantity ordered, and the discount
structure. It's been a few years since I've worked in record/CD retailing, but I
don't imagine that the situation has improved for the retailer. Typically, a CD
that retails for $14.99 costs the retailer about $12.00 (sometimes more,
sometimes less). This is for retailers that don't sell at the list price; for
those that do the margin is, obviously, somewhat more.
The situation is similar for books: the standard discount is 40% off the cover
price (20% for academic and some other titles), although big retailers like
Borders that buy in bulk can get 50-60% off hot titles. In comparison, clothing
is a different story, with retail markups of 100-200% being common (those $80
running shoes probably cost the retailer $30-$40 a pair).
In any case, the actual manufacturing cost of a CD is mere pennies (or else AOL
and the rest couldn't afford to send out millions of free CDs in the mail); the
most costly part of CD manufacturing (as it was with LPs) is the
cover/booklet--four-color printing is expensive. The original excuse for high CD
prices was the capital expenditure necessary to build the first CD manufacturing
plants in the 1980s; since then those costs have almost certainly been recouped,
but since the buying public has become accustomed to CD prices in the mid-teens
the record companies have no incentive to lower prices--when sales fall off they
simply release repackaged and/or remastered versions of the same old recordings.
DVD-A is the next repackaging, and the record companies are hoping music buyers
will replace their CD collections the way they replaced their LP collections.
Although DVD-A has the potential to significantly improve the sound quality of
recorded music for those who have high-resolution audio systems, as it now
stands the technology appears to be inseparably wedded to video, which will
likely compromise the real-world audio quality of DVD-A discs in important ways
(due to the way in which the audio is implemented). The market for big-and-loud
TV is far larger than the market for high-quality, high-resolution music
recordings, and DVD-A will, IMO, always be an afterthought.
As a storage medium for photographs CDs have certain practical limitations. One
is an uncertain life-span--I have music CDs that have corroded to uselessness in
only a few years, so as a technology CD is certainly not infallible. Also, any
scan or digital photo made today is limited by the current state of
digital-imaging technology. For images made with an EOS D30 this may not be an
issue since the image will never be better than when it was made in the camera,
but I fully expect to be able to get far superior scans of film images from a
desktop scanner ten years from now than I can today, and would never consider
any digital file of one of my images to be "definitive." The film is the
definitive version, and with reasonable care it can be scanned and rescanned any
number of times, as scanning technology improves. No matter what happens with
digital, I will always have my film originals (barring fire or flood).
fcc
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