My own experience of this is AllofMP3.com Firstly they actually have a product that I want to buy. eg MP3, LAME 192Kb VBR with no DRM. And that product is typically $0.01 or occasionally $0.02 per Mb. At that price I’m spending more per month than I did at Amazon before it came along.

So what if Apple, Virgin et al sold non-DRM MP3 192Kb VBR as well. What would you pay for it and at what stage would you pay for the convenience of having properly encoded music with accurate tags and no hassle? It’s somewhere between $0.01 and $0.25 per Mb. I figure that around $0.10 they would make serious inroads into file sharing. This corresponds to somewhere around $0.40 per song. Can they make money at that price point without DRM? Sure they can.

Very respectfully, Regine W. Griffin

for a 13 song cd, thats nearly $13. For about a dollar more, i can get a brand new cd, with liner notes and cover art (and higher quality music in most cases).

A better solution would be a flat fee of 5-10 dollars a month for unlimited downloads. Compared to 99 cents per track, its sounds absurd, but with a deal like that, major label music and indie music would be on a level playing field, and you could try out many new bands. The price could be divied up, depending on popularity of the tracks. With this model, you would have no fake files, a more reliable and faster network (since it would be “legal” people wouldnt have a need to fake files or quit uploading). It works out for artists and labels. If even half of the 7 million people on file sharing networks at any given time paid the $5/month, the earnings would be $17,500,000 per MONTH… this is with basically no overhead. You would pay a few salaries for software designers and some advertising, but there is no packaging, no shipping, no biilding with electric bills, no materials, etc. This is easy money, but companies are too blind to see it. I would pay, its cheaper than cable, its cheaper than my phone bill. If it was this cheap, with no restrictions and more reliability, people will pay, its just that the current method cheats artists and stuffs labels while restricting my fair use rights.

http://www.downhillbattle.org/itunes/ << for how the 99 cents cheats artists.

MTW

Oh boy, here we go. Do you cheapos show go steal a BMW because you think they charge too much for them?
If music isn’t worth 99 cents a song to you, maybe you shouldn’t listen to it.
The endless hand-wringing over justifying stealing something that does not belong to you is a source of entertainment itself.

And by the way-don’t vote either!

zzzzzzzzzz

“Peer to peer should be called scumbag to scumbag”

Nick Weston