My solution to CD piracy

Make CDs $5 retail. No, not $10, not $7... $5. There. Right now, I only buy a handful of CDs a year. I have to be pretty sure I like most of the album before I fork out $15-$20. It's too prohibitive to do that upon only hearing or liking 1 song. Ok, sometimes I am caught in that adventurous mood but I usually end up regretting it. Now, if CDs were $5 I'd go out and by 5 tomorrow, probably on the order of 10 a month on average. Those recording folk would get much much more of my money than what I spend now. I'd be much more willing to experiment and that would give some support to a wider number of artists. I get frustrated knowing there's a LOT of music out there that I know I'd love but haven't heard of or heard enough of. Does $5 cut into the industry profit margins? On the surface yes but I believe they'd more than make up for it in volume. E.g. I think that if they cut the standard price by a factor of 4, they would MORE than quadruple their sales. People like me wouldn't hesitate to buy some old favorites or check out new bands or even re-purchase the stuff that we already bought on vinyl or cassette.

I'm no economist but I actually think a quadruple in sales is a conservative estimate. I think the increase would be more than that since I believe they'd recoup most of the money that gets "lost" to piracy. A $5 price-point would eliminate most of the incentive to buy a cheap $2-$3 knock-off from the street vendor with the photo-copied cover; when for a couple dollars more they could get a legit copy with the complete liner notes and possibly the special packaging. Makes sense to me. They wouldn't really need to muck about with all those dubious schemes of copy-protection/virus-infection, making incompatible CDs, CDs that degrade after X number of plays, etc. (I think all of those attempts are futile to begin with.)

When CDs first came out, they were at around $18. Now that they're dirt cheap to make they're still sitting at around that price. Yeh, I know some marketing research dweeb ran through some statistical models and decided that $15-$20 (gotta include the tax) was the most people would be willing to pay and give the companies the highest yield, especially when it's the young folk who buy most of the music and I suspect often times regardless of cost due to peer pressure or parental subsidy. I submit, that that's the wrong approach. The unreasonably high cost creates a ripe market for unscrupulous people to produce dirt cheap copies and sell them for a couple bucks. They claim to be loosing millions, nay... billions, to pirates (Psshaaw, according to their artificial price).

A former coworker of mine once countered "yeh, but no-one who really collects music pays that full price anyways" in reference to used CD stores and CD clubs where they try to unload all of the older stuff or stuff that doesn't sell well at a "discount." Used CD stores are great, but the selection can sometimes be troublesome. I find CD clubs a bit annoying, especially when they rely on sending you things if you fail to return the little slip in time. Plus you're not going to find the newest stuff in those clubs. You'd also have to join several different clubs to begin with because each club represents a different set of labels.

Ok, I will admit that this idea and topic may be all but moot. This is of course due to the relatively new phenomena of online distribution. With Napster I think everyone realized this was the wave of the future, as I certainly did (in ref. to the online distribution, not the piracy, or perhaps that too). Of course the music industry shut Napster down, clinging to their outdated business models, but eventually they found a way to capitalize on it a la iTunes and similar. For the most part I think they have made good on a good idea. I can at least buy individual songs and have it quickly and effortlessly. The price is unfortunately twice what I think it should be and predictably the RIAA is currently insisting that the price be increased for the popular songs or risk loosing their catalog. (Bleh!) Then there are the digital rights management schemes that are also inconvenient, but that's another topic. Overall, though, I'll give this avenue a little more support simply due to the increased flexibility, efficiency, and convenience.

Still, even though there may come a day I may never buy a packaged CD again or perhaps store-bought CD's will become a thing of the past, I still think so long as pirated CDs are being sold that my solution has some merit. With the internet the RIAA has no hope of eliminating unauthorized distribution and I almost think it's a wasted effort. But with knock-off street-vendors, who are actually selling discs for money (rather than making copies and throwing them out there for all to obtain for free) , I'm fairly confident that this would put a big dent in their viability. With low-priced CDs the industry may even begin to stop treating their customers like criminals as they see their legitimate sales increase.