Originally posted by: purbeast0
Originally posted by: dabuddha
Originally posted by: purbeast0
Umm ... because when you buy a CD you aren't paying for the actual media, you are paying for the music. why the hell do you think video games cost $50 and DVDS cost $20 (respectively) even though they both use DVD media?
again, you aren't paying for the actual media ... you are paying for the content. i thought this was common sense lol.
True but when they first come out, the cost of producing the dvd/cd is factored into the sale price. And you know the cost of the dvd/cd in their early days was much much higher than today. Yet the prices are still the same.
The prices that companies pay for the actual media that dvd movies or cd's are printed on is probably less than .05$ a piece. I really don't think that number changing from say .10$ a piece is going to affect the actual price of the item.
EDIT: for the record ... those numbers I pulled out of my ass are all guestimations.
what pisses people off is that the record companies switch excuses to keep justifying silly prices.
late 80s/early 90s
record execs: "cds are $15 a pop because it's new technology and it's expensive to manufacture. if you don't want to pay that much you can buy the cassette or vinyl for $8"
consumers: oh, fine, I guess they'll come down eventually.
mid 90s
consumers: "hey, what gives, cd prices never came down, even though it now only costs pennies to make them"
record companies: Oh, well, we've had to spend more on things like music videos, so there's costs other than production bundled into that. but don't worry, things have stabalized, so expect prices to remain constant. So really with inflation it'll push the actual cost down. BTW: we've pretty much stopped producing cassettes, and vinyl will only get released as even more expensive limited editions. cds are cheap! really.
consumers: hmmm, whatever. I don't like it. I'm looking for coupons.
a few years back:
consumers: WTF? prices are going up faster than inflation. including promotion, production, distrobution, and paying everyone involved, a cd still costs less than $2 per disk for you. Yesterday I saw the spiderman dvd for $12 and the soundtrack was $18. aren't dvds newer and more expensive technology? aren't movies far more expensive to produce, promote and distribute than cds? what's going on? you tricked us. can we sue for price fixing? we can? great! too bad the settlement for tens of millions of dollars really doesn't hurt them at all, and all I got for the hundreds of dollars I overpaid on cds was a lousy $13.xx. bastards.
record companies: wait, wait! you're not paying for the media when you buy a cd, you're paying for the content. Really! we mean it. it's all the intellectual property! downloading is illegal! uh, um, we'll sue you back!
consumers: I might still be listening if you gave the artists more than 3-4% of the profits. screw off.