In other words, the record companies are getting 75-85 cents per song and they do no work whatsoever. The entire cost falls on Apple/Napster/etc…

However the consumer is being ripped off in other ways. The $13.99 cost for a physical copy includes the material and packaging costs of the CD itself, the cost to ship the CD from point A to B, and the overhead of the studio, distribution system and store selling the CD.

None of these costs exist for a digital copy. While Apple claims the margins are razor thin, I’m certain that’s because the music industry is gouging them.

The fixed cost for storing the entire Apple itunes archive of 700,000 songs is roughly $30,000 in hard drives. Bandwidth for the 250+ million songs they served this year, over-estimating here, But is about $3 million. Even assuming another $5 million in infrastructure and administration …. That’s a total overhead under $10 mil - which works out to a nickle per song in 2004.

If the hard cost is five cents a song - what justifies a dollar a song? Where is all this money going to. We know it’s likely not the artist.

-Tragic

They’re obviously desperate to impress total strangers.. putz

If you do a frequency analysis on a recording encoded at 128kb/sec, you will find that all frequencies above 16kHz are removed. Stepping up the bitrate improves this cutoff. For example, at 192kb/sec you may have a cutoff at 18kHz. Even at the highest bitrate of 320kb/sec, a frequency analysis will show that there is information missing compared to the CD. (Note that large amounts of information at the lower frequencies are also altered when converting to mp3 as well, but these altered frequencies will not be as noticeable to most listeners on inferior systems.)

There are people out there who are purists when it comes to music, they want the best quality sound reproduced in their own homes.

Most of the masses have never experience well recorded music in a properly set up stereo system (and they may not be interested in doing so). The reason I say well recorded music is because much of the mainstream Pop/Rock music released these days does not compare to rock recordings made over 30-40 years ago. And I’m not talking about musical quality but just in terms of sound quality. Even an untrained ear will be able to hear some difference/improvement in a recording played on a good quality stereo system.

When you do experience true stereo, it will seem like the performers are right there in your room. You will see 2 speakers standing there in front of you but it will seem like the sound is not emanating from them. You will hear sounds coming from all around the speakers as well as between them.

The description may sound magical, but when you experience it you will feel the magic.

So even though the argument is that most people will not be able to hear the difference, there are people out there that may very well be able to. And this inferior quality music is being sold to us online for just a little less than the original CD at a record store.

In reality, people are getting ripped off, and it appears they are happy to be. Maybe that would change if they were aware of what is missing.

TV

Of course as most people should know this arguement is complete crap since you can lossless copies of the songs that are only 50% of their original size.
A lame vbr mp3 at 192 is perfectly fine. If you really think your hearing is better than 99% of the population then perhaps you could go a little higher but for most music this is pointless. Calling this FM quality are just plain ignorant.

Forget iTunes go Russia. All that you can leave behind…..