Poll: What's a decent price for a downloaded album
 

I think I could go for 1-2 dollahs for an album of 192k mp3s with printable cover art downloaded from a fast server.

I voted:beer:

hey, you're cheap like me ;)

and if they kept the the money at 1 or 2 dollars a download the artists will be making more than they are now. at some point somebody needs to take those procrastinating musicians by their goates and rap them firmly on thier collective coconuts until they get the message. the future's here now you knuckleheads. the time is well past for you to be sitting around waiting for the riaa to come to it's senses. that ain't going to happen. the riaa will go down in flames before it changes its way of paying you.

so -

make your album yourself, email it to the critics and the fm stations but host it on your site. that way when you sell it for a dollar ninety-nine you keep all the money. 2 bucks an album! it's more than anybody's ever going to give you otherwise and it's 8 bucks less than those crappy itunes that they're selling hundreds of thousands of a week. wake up! people are buying!

you'll be happy, yer audience'll be happy.

chop chop.

- js.

I think there's a market for some music distribution website to come along and usurp both the labels and iTunes and Napster 2 at a reasonable price. Somebody give me $200, 000.

for a fast server and 192kbs i'd pay 5dollah an album.

its not like the kind of music i listen to is so heavily promoted by the labels anyways. i don't see why something else hasn't taken root yet to try to create buzz for bands without the giant costs.

mp3.com's problem was they allowed everyone in. it needs to be something more selective...

Considering that 5 dollars should be the price for the physical product, 1 or 2 dollars for an mp3 album is fair. I'd only pay 5 dollars if the download were in a lossless format eg. wav, shorten, monkey's audio. ;)

Well it's not just the distribution technology that artists can take advantage of, it's the compression technology as well. A CD only has two channels of audio while an OGG or an AAC can do as many as you want. I mean, I was excited to get a DVD-Audio player until I found out that nobody has put out a DVD-A record that I want to buy, the selection is dismal. But multi channel audio is easy to distribute online, and the production costs can't be much higher than mass market CD production. I'd pay two dollars for a stereo album and five for a multi channel album.

So how big would an album be in one of those wonderful formats?

Depending on the format, maybe twice the size of an MP3. I think thats reasonable for five bucks. I can't vouch for the quality of the record company offerings, though. iTunes AAC doesn't hold up against LAME, though it could if they used a slightly higher bitrate. It seems to me that quality is purposly reduced in online music stores to make the hardcopies seem more valuable than they really are.

But a good engineer can compress a multi channel song into a small size without compromising too much on quality. And surround sound has a way of tricking the listener into hearing more sound than has acutally been encoded. It all just makes MP3 sound so obsolete, especially CBR.

I voted for less than 2 dollars.

As a matter of fact I already buy albums legit for less than 2 dollars, but you have to surf all the way to Spain or Russia for this. At least these guys know how to set up a service. No DRM and WMA shit. Plain unprotected. mp3.

Allofmp3 even offers online encoding for most albums. You can get Lame encoded mp3 in alt preset standard, extreme or insane. You pay per Mb so if you want a higher quality you pay (a little) more.

You can find more about these overseas services at museekster.com

Don't know if this site is credible but I so far I am glad they pointed me to the Russian style of online music.

Pretty much my idea of reasonable and competitive (with free p2p) pricing.

- tg :WA:

Do these rates you all mention come with a one time cost or would you pay again if you need to redownload an album?

Well if I managed to lose an album after downloading it, I would consider it my own fault and pay another dollar to redownload it, if the album was worth it. I am of course talking about non-DRM albums in public and open formats like mp3 & ogg that I can back up freely and use as I wish. Any DRM wrappers and related usage limitations would make the album virtually worthless for me, and I wouldn't buy it or download it in the first place.

- tg :WA:

I voted $5.

But, I don´t pay for album with less than 1 hour music.
I´ve seen "albums" with 38 - 48 min of music. :no: Same shit with Live performance DVDs with 50 - 60 min Full Price!

If someone / some company got their shit together and offered a great selectin, 192 bitrate, fast server, decent "packaging" (what i mean is that every album on the server is zipped or rar'ed or packaged somehow so you only have to download one file and get the whole album) including cover art. I would pay $2 a cd for that...but not much more...$5 just seems a little steep