UMG To Price New CDs Under $10 362
marmoset writes "Perhaps a decade late, Universal Music Group has decided to try out sub-$10 CD pricing in the US. 'Beginning in the second quarter and continuing through most of the year, the company's Velocity program will test lower CD prices. Single CDs will have the suggested list prices of $10, $9, $8, $7 and $6.'" CD retailers are not convinced the price cuts will work out. For one thing it depends on whether other major labels follow suit, but the article notes that "executives at the other majors were nervous about the UMG move" and "privately, some appeared annoyed."
Re:CDs! How *quaint* (Score:4, Informative)
If you find this concept quaint then why are vinyl sales slowly rising?
Even the link you quoted shows that ALL forms of music - CD's, digital, AND vinyl - are rising in sales. Vinyl also, despite "rising" sales, is still not really selling in any significant amounts.
As the article pointed out, Taylor Swift's latest album sold nearly twice as many copies in six months as the ENTIRE SALES VOLUME of vinyl records in a year.
Vinyl is making about as much of a comeback as any other retro tech - some people are clinging to it, but you're dreaming if you think that there's going to be some mass movement back to the format.
Re:Shocking (Score:3, Informative)
To be fair, CD prices have dropped, especially if you consider inflation. How much were you paying for your vinyl records in 1985? When we account for the rate of inflation, paying $20 US for a CD today is equivalent to paying about $10 back then. The average price of a CD today - roughly $13 - is equivalent to about $6.50 in 1985. Were your records were much cheaper than that?
Re:CDs! How *quaint* (Score:3, Informative)
Sure it can. It just usually isn't. The dynamic range of vinyl is less than that of CDs, so if you had an uncompressed (dynamic range) digital music file, you'd have to compress it more to put it on vinyl than on a CD. If you chose to compress it even further, you could do it on either vinyl or CDs.
Re:I Am Shocked! (Score:4, Informative)
And those places aren't good listening conditions, nor do people really care about audio quality. Heck, I'd guess radio stations have gone MP3 as well simply because radio is a poor quality audio transmission medium to begin with. Plus, MP3 is great with some types of music (rock/metal/etc) where adding (dynamic-range) compression/distortions/etc and artifacting don't make a big difference, and can enhance the music. Hell, clipping can help, too.
But other types of music, like say, classical, orchestral and the like, (data) compression can add unpleasant artifacts to the sound. Add in clipping and it makes it even worse (this kind of music also often has huge dynamic range variations which is very hard to compress).
Finally, I will say that certain compression levels you can't tell, it's not being able to control the compression that hurts. I could buy reasonably sounding music through iTunes, confident in the 256kbps AAC to do a reasonably good job. But there's the little worry that if the music is too demanding, that 256kbps might not be enough (that's why people use VBR).
I personally buy CDs, that way I can control how it's encoded (I know that LAME presets do a really good job). Since the quality loss happens in the encoder, a good encoder and a lousy encoder will have visible differences in final quality.
Re:CDs! How *quaint* (Score:2, Informative)
Because the dynamic range of vinyl albums can't be compressed as much as they are on a CD resulting in better sounding music?
The dynamic range of CDs is actually at least three [hydrogenaudio.org] orders higher than that of vinyl (120dB dynamic range for high-end vinyl equipment vs 150dB for CDs). The reason that CDs sound worse is because of the skill (and agenda) of the sound engineers, not the medium.
Re:I Am Shocked! (Score:3, Informative)
Any time you hear music at a club, bar, or formal function these days, chances are you're listening to an MP3.
I'm no audiophile, but even I can tell that the PA speakers used in those situations sound like total crap. Of course nobody would notice if the earsplitting output of those ugly black crates originally came from a less than perfect source.
Only in the US.... (Score:2, Informative)
And they seem honestly surprised why I'm not willing to pay that much...
Re:Just like cassettes (Score:3, Informative)
Nowadays RIAA doesn't sue people for having MP3s.
They sue them for uploading the MP3s, so having ownership doesn't matter if they have a record of you ULing the songs.
Hopefully they will change the cost too (Score:1, Informative)
Sony did this already but the problem is that while they lowered the list price substantially, they only lowered the actual wholesale cost a tiny bit so a CD that has a list price of 9.99 actually costs the retailer 8.69. The upshot is that nobody can stay in business by selling these CDs at or below the list price. The record store I manage has to sell the 9.99 list price Sony CDs at 12.99 to make enough money to justify carrying them. Other record companies, when they set the list price at 10 bucks, set the wholesale cost at somewhere between 6 and 7 bucks, which is fair and reasonable. Sony basically just changed their list prices without changing the wholesale prices so they could claim that they responded to customers complaints about pricing, while forcing retailers to either price things above list price and look like they are the ones screwing the customer, or not carry them at all. Hopefully UMG isn't going to be following this pattern of behavior, and will let retailers actually carry and sell their releases for a fair price.
Re:CDs! How *quaint* (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I Am Shocked! (Score:5, Informative)
I produce MP3's for mass distribution, and also support them when they don't function correctly (encoding/corruption issues).
In my opinion, VBR is not supported well-enough for mass consumption. Too many players out there still dork up when VBR is used. Granted, it's typically older players, but they are still out there.
The majority of people cannot tell the difference between (get this) 32kbps and 128kbps. I'm talking about the general population, not music enthusiasts. Most engineers cannot tell the difference between 162kbps and 192kbs, and certainly less of them can distinguish 192kbps and 256kbps -- and even I have doubts that most of those can in a true blind test.
But consider this: I put forth that the reason the you don't need full 44khz 16-bit audio is that you'll never hear the music as originally intended, and that is because of the following factors:
1) You usually listen in your car, and road-noise alone will destroy your ability to discern slight volume changes and perception of frequencies anywhere near 12khz and above
2) If you don't listen in a car, you often use your cheap speakers on your laptop
3) Most headphones people use are either cheap (under $50), or they are biased on the lower-end, and most are not equalized correctly, or not equalized to your ear physiology (different sizes ear canals can cause resonance/standing waves that cause a different perception in frequency for different people -- each set must be tuned individually if you are a true audiophile).
4) If you're older than 21, you probably can't hear above 16Khz at all
5) Your ears are not perfect (many people's frequency response is different from one ear to the other)
6) Your player is not perfect
7) Your speakers are not perfect, and you most likely haven't calibrated them with an RTA for the room they sit in or for where people are actually positioned.
8) The humidity, temperature, air pressure, and even the air pressure on the other side of your ear-drum changes frequently causing a difference in frequency response.
And if I'm completely wrong on points 1-8, then you are now in the .01% of all listeners, and you are not the target audience for mass-produced and distributed MP3s anyway.