High-quality downloads - are they a rip off?

[admin_exported]

Some sites, such as Linn and Chandos charge considerably more for 24 bit downloads than for the lower quality formats. eclassical.com doesn't and my B&W Society of Sound membership allows me to download any or all of the formats within the same subscription.

Is there any justification for a higher price? Storage requirements at current disk space costs can't do it and it probably takes more effort to generate the MP3 versions assuming they are starting from the high quality master.

Anybody have any other recommended sites?

 

[Andrew Everard]

Simple: if you think they're a rip-off, don't buy them.

 

[TALON1973]

should be interesting when apple goes live with thier hd music

 

[Alantiggger]

Andrew Everard:Simple: if you think they're a rip-off, don't buy them.

Same... if you think they are not worth it ... don't do.

 

[6th.replicant]

Andrew Everard:Simple: if you think they're a rip-off, don't buy them.

Or we could have a constructive discussion and voice our opinions...

FWIW, I agree with the OP.

IMHO, Linn's 192kHz material, in particular, is a huge rip-off. Twenty quid for an album? Why so? Linn doesn't have to handover 30% to iTunes/Apple and, of course, there're no costs for shipping, packaging or disc pressings.

Linn's pricing structure also begs the question: Why does it charge more for a 88-96kHz/24bit download than it does for a hybrid CD/SA-CD?

HDtracks.com has recently started offering 192kHz but, alas, has jumped on the £20/album gravy train, although its 88-96kHz remain at c. £11, for the time being...

The Boston Symphony Orchestra (bso.org) has a reasonable selection of 88kHz/24bit, costing $10 (£6) for an album. Is the BSO a not-for-profit organisation..?

 

[Anonymous]

Well, being a simple person. I had already worked out that I wouldn't buy those that I considered overpriced and I'm pleased to receive confirmation that that is the correct policy from such authoritative sources. Nevertheless I thought it was a topic worth airing and luckily 6th.Replicant agrees.

I suppose that I hoped that a magazine such as What Hi Fi might come up with some reason that a simple person, such as myself, had overlooked. Furthermore, and failing to come up with such a reason (as a consulting editor appears to have done), then the magazine could perhaps seek some justification from the companies concerned.

Apart from being expensive, the per-track charges seem so arbitrary. If it's more than 5 mins long it's twice the price, if it's more than 10 mins it's more again... It reminds me of the phrase 'never mind the quality, feel the width'

 

[Andrew Everard]

There's really no need to start sniping: I merely offered an opinion.

If you want more, I think the price of these hi-rez downloads relative to the standard definition or MP3 versions is more than justified by the relative sound quality on offer, and merely taking the view of the work/resources involved in making the download available is confusing cost with value.

Regarding the price differential between Linn's hybrid SACDs and downloads, I suspect the price of the Linn discs is kept down in order to appeal to CD buyers who may not ever use the SACD layer.

 

[Overdose]

In short, yes they are a rip off.

Most music is mastered in 24 bit and dowmixed to 16 bit to fit on a CD.

If profit is made at the CD level, then selling the original quality master as a much more expensive option is frankly, daylight robbery. Particularly considering the fact that you have no physical goods to show for your purchase.

Personally I think most download music is a rip off and is as far from VFM as you can get, as the cost of a download album is no less than a CD and it comes with the added 'bonus' of being compressed.

I can never understand why anyone would pay more for less?

Paying CD prices for CD quality makes sense and a small premium to cover the extra bandwidth and storage costs of larger high-res formats would be acceptable, but this would still not make for a large price increase.

 

[Overdose]

Andrew Everard:
If you want more, I think the price of these hi-rez downloads relative to the standard definition or MP3 versions is more than justified by the relative sound quality on offer, and merely taking the view of the work/resources involved in making the download available is confusing cost with value.

Surely value and cost are directly related and not mutually independent?

 

[the_dude2]

i agree with Overdose. Why charge so much extra for something that has less work done to it. ie the time spent down mixing to 16bit.

I also recently read an interesting post on a headphone forum (unfortunately for me i cant remember where so cant post a link, but try google searching 16bit v 24bit truth exposed or such like) that highlights what a con at the consumer level 24bit is anyway. If mastered properly 16bit and 24bit should should be identical, as our hearing ability isnt capable of hearing beyond 16bit/44.1khz anyway.

As always its all about making as much money as possible, and if the marketing departments can convince everyone they need 24bit then so much the better for them.

However, if buying a 24bit recording means i dont get a lazily mixed/produced 16bit version then that could be considered worthwhile, but not at such an extra cost due to the reason stated by Overdose originally.

The important point here is its not about the technology, ie 16bit or 24bit, its about how well it was recorded in the first place.

So short answer to the OP, yes they are

 

[Andrew Everard]

As JD has just posted in a parallel thread,

JohnDuncan:The bandwidth cost is not to be overlooked. But before somebody tells me that you can buy a 250gig hard drive for 30 quid, the cost of high availability, high resilience storage is somewhat higher - I have to pay £90 per year, per gig for my file storage allocation for my department...

 

[John Duncan]

the_dude2:Why charge so much extra for something that has less work done to it.

1) More time and resources will be involved in making a studio master available online than an mp3. How long does it take you to copy a 20meg file from one place to another, compared to a 2meg file?

2) The provider pays for the storage costs of the high res file. This cost is almost directly proportional to the size of the file, and is non-trivial.

3) The provider pays for the bandwith costs of you downloading the high res file. This cost is also almost directly proportional to the size of the file, and is also non-trivial.

4) About 0.01% of people will buy them, which makes it an expensive business.

 

[basshead]

Overdose:Andrew Everard:
If you want more, I think the price of these hi-rez downloads relative to the standard definition or MP3 versions is more than justified by the relative sound quality on offer, and merely taking the view of the work/resources involved in making the download available is confusing cost with value.

Surely value and cost are directly related and not mutually independent?

the value of a product is whatever people will pay for it, not how much it cost to produce.

hi-res downloads are a niche market, a luxury product, so will inevitably come with a high price-tag. Also consider this, if such downloads were made cheaper then more people may buy them, it is possible that the businesses involved do not want more sales as they would have to invest capital to accommodate this. It may just be a more sustainable business to make fewer sales with a higher profit margin than higher sales at a lower profit margin.

 

[the_dude2]

JohnDuncan:the_dude2:Why charge so much extra for something that has less work done to it.1) More time and resources will be involved in making a studio master available online than an mp3. How long does it take you to copy a 20meg file from one place to another, compared to a 2meg file?2) The provider pays for the storage costs of the high res file. This cost is almost directly proportional to the size of the file, and is non-trivial.3) The provider pays for the bandwith costs of you downloading the high res file. This cost is also almost directly proportional to the size of the file, and is also non-trivial.4) About 0.01% of people will buy them, which makes it an expensive business.

I understand your points. Wouldn't it therefore be cheaper to mix a 16bit version "properly" then? Which would benefit the other 99.9% of people and eliminate the time and costs involved in the points you have made?

Edit:- it would also negate the need to buy what is generally more expensive equipment to play 24bit files?

 

[Anonymous]

JohnDuncan: 1) More time and resources will be involved in making a studio master available online than an mp3. How long does it take you to copy a 20meg file from one place to another, compared to a 2meg file?

On a gigabit network? Hardly measurable. It takes me about 5 secs to download 20 Mbytes across the internet!

JohnDuncan: 2) The provider pays for the storage costs of the high res file. This cost is almost directly proportional to the size of the file, and is non-trivial.

True but I really don't think this alone can justify the increased cost.

JohnDuncan: 3) The provider pays for the bandwith costs of you downloading the high res file. This cost is also almost directly proportional to the size of the file, and is also non-trivial.

Do you think they have a volume-based contract with their ISP? Seems unlikely to me.

JohnDuncan: 4) About 0.01% of people will buy them, which makes it an expensive business.

Yes - however if they charged less maybe more would buy them?

{BTW First time I've used this forum so apologies if this looks a mess - the preview facility doesn't seem to work for me and neither does the HTML editor .. or even the italics button}

 

[Anonymous]

Andrew Everard:
There's really no need to start sniping: I merely offered an opinion.

Truly sorry to snipe but it wasn't an opinion on what I originally asked - it was an opinion on what I could do about it.

I could understand the argument about paying more for higher quality if it has demonstrably cost more to provide it. Is higher quality intrinsically worth more regardless? On a physical product one can appreciate that higher production costs would be incurred or maybe extra research costs or innovation to get better quality using cheaper production techniques but when it's just the bits of data?

Incidentally on the cost of commercial disk space I run a clinical system in the NHS - 200 Gbytes of highly resilient and highly available (so actually taking up almost a terabyte) and backed up data. If it cost us £90 per Gbyte we'd be sacking some nurses to pay for it. Of course as it is we are sacking them for other cost reasons :-(

 

[Overdose]

Has anyone actually bothered to look into the real costs here, or are some quite willing to be blindly fleeced?

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2010/04/20/another-view-peering-clearly-at-the-future/

http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_online_vi/2010/01/bandwidth-pricing-trends-cost-to-stream-a-movie-today-five-cents-cost-in-1998-270.html

http://gravitationalpull.net/wp/?p=1205

Having just done a basic calculation of 2Tb bandwidth/month streaming CD quality music, the cost is somewhere around 5 cents/album (not per track). That's old prices mind you, so the costs here will be lower. Storage costs would come in much lower, I'd say.

 

[Andrew Everard]

Yes, but then even with a traditional physical audio album, the costs of manufacture and distribution are only a very small part of the total costs. Even more so with movies.

 

[Overdose]

Andrew, I totally agree, but my point was more aimed at the OPs question, rather than the parallel argument of how much we should be paying for our music. Besides, the bandwidth and storage is the only cost component that would be changing.

Lets not forget that the largest reason for illegal file sharing is money. If music were fairly priced, many more people would be inclined to buy rather than steal.

 

[manicm]

Overdose:

Andrew, I totally agree, but my point was more aimed at the OPs question, rather than the parallel argument of how much we should be paying for our music. Besides, the bandwidth and storage is the only cost component that would be changing.

Lets not forget that the largest reason for illegal file sharing is money. If music were fairly priced, many more people would be inclined to buy rather than steal.

I'm not so sure. I think 8 to 9 pounds is reasonable for a CD? So I don't think people would be 'inclined to buy rather than steal'. I think people don't perceive value in recorded music anymore i.e. they don't want to pay.

And if you think I'm wrong a Linn thread revealed many DS owners use bit torrents to acquire music. So some people with very expensive hifi are not paying for music.

So there you go.

 

[Overdose]

Yes, but CDs have only regularly been as low as the £8/9 mark since
the advent of mass piracy, an all too belated effort to stem the flood
methinks.

If peoples perception of the value of recorded music has waned, then
high-res downloads will be seen as an even bigger rip off that they will
be even less inclined to pay for.

So, back to the OPs question regarding the value of high-res
music downloads, still a rip off IMO, but I stand to be convinced otherwise.

 

[manicm]

My feeling is that for music that they want, there'll be a larger audience for hi-res music than one would think, with the capable equipment.