Coming Soon: The $30 Pay-Per-View Movie

[Sir Terrence the Terrible]

Terrence, sorry: I made that sound a little more personal than I meant.

No worries, you know I have thick skin

The market decides what the selling price of things is be. This is the case even for such quasi-monopolies as copyright musical content, (though the price is higher than it would be if there were real competion). Who can be sure? Maybe $30 for premier non-theater viewing might be a huge seller. Like Wooch implies, it is just an other market stratification ploy. (Market stratification is finding ways to ensure that those willing to pay a higher price actually will pay the higher price rather the cross-market average price.)

Feanor, there is plenty of competition for copyrighting musical content. The Record companies have their own copyright administration, and there are literally hundreds of copyright administrators. Copyright Administration is no monopoly, its not even close to one.

Sure, Apple, the retailer, ultimately decides the download price, (say $0.90/song). But as we established in earlier threads, the royalty is by far the largest portion of the to Apple. And the royalty, the cost component is, indeed, set further up the distribution chain than the retailer.

You are correct, the royalty costs are set further up the chain than retail. From a .90 cents a song price, between 6-8% goes directly to the artist. That is the percentage for downloads, and only the top artists get the 8%. This is then followed by including costs of the sale, digital rights management costs, bandwidth fees, transaction fees, mechanical royalties to songwriters/publishers, marketing costs, etc. This all goes for a single song. If I was selling an album, these costs are spread over the entire album. There are costs between the label and the retail concerns, and costs between the record company and the artist. The market decides what these costs are going to be, and let's face it(and as much as I hate to say it) this is capitalism at work.

[pixelthis]

I was told once that the entire cost of putting a disc together (and thats everything)
was around two bucks. The rest is pure gravy. THIS WAS IN "95", but even if you doubled it thats still just four bucks. Where I worked minimum wage temps were brought in on
an hourly basis to pack discs.
Once they called in a hundred, the discs weren't made for some reason, and they sent everybody home.
RECORD companies have been raking in the bounty for years, and yes, this is the free market, and said market requires some discipline, or it will bite you in the butt.
PEOPLE in the record industry are used to making bookoos of money without trying
that hard, something I CALL THE "Charlie Sheen EFFECT", and now the collective
trip called the record industry is about over. SOMETIMES the free market works slowly,
but it does work.