iTunes downloads: too ££?

[Overdose]

So buy the second hand CD then send all the money you saved off the price of a new one to the artist. Their cut of the total money you spend will be much bigger that way too.

I like it. 🙂 Not sure that Paul Hobbs would though, regardless of standpoint.

Back on track, I cannot understand why anyone would buy a higher priced download that is a compressed version of the CD and has had all the artwork and cover notes removed.

Suckers.

 

[MajorFubar]

try re-reading my posts without the assumption I'm 'digging myself out of something' and they should seem reasonable.

Like I said, I respect your choice to always buy new albums, but what concerns me is the fact you don't appear to be able to tell the difference between piracy and passing-on the right to play the same copy of the same album to someone else. I guess it's something you're just going to have to work out for yourself.

And as for paying the artist a second time, well I know it was said tongue-in-cheek, but that wouldn't be appropriate either. If you buy a new car then later sell it, the manufacturer doesn't expect to receive its cut of the sales-price. Feel free to substitute 'car' with 'CD' or anything else you can think of which has the potential to be passed to another keeper and re-used. The only difference is that CDs can be perfectly duplicated at home (more or less) or streamed illegally, but that's not the debate.

 

[relocated]

So buy the second hand CD then send all the money you saved off the price of a new one to the artist. Their cut of the total money you spend will be much bigger that way too.

I like it. 🙂 Not sure that Paul Hobbs would though, regardless of standpoint.

Back on track, I cannot understand why anyone would buy a higher priced download that is a compressed version of the CD and has had all the artwork and cover notes removed.

Suckers.

+1 to both scoot and Overdose.

 

[BenLaw]

try re-reading my posts without the assumption I'm 'digging myself out of something' and they should seem reasonable.

Like I said, I respect your choice to always buy new albums, but what concerns me is the fact you don't appear to be able to tell the difference between piracy and passing-on the right to play the same copy of the same album to someone else. I guess it's something you're just going to have to work out for yourself.

And as for paying the artist a second time, well I know it was said tongue-in-cheek, but that wouldn't be appropriate either. If you buy a new car then later sell it, the manufacturer doesn't expect to receive its cut of the sales-price. Feel free to substitute 'car' with 'CD' or anything else you can think of which has the potential to be passed to another keeper and re-used. The only difference is that CDs can be perfectly duplicated at home (more or less) or streamed illegally, but that's not the debate.

Gotta side with the Major on this one. There's no distinction between CDs and any other goods that might be sold second hand. If you buy, for example, a second hand CD player the object gets passed on and the designer / manufacturer / retailer only gets their one initial payment. I suppose the confusion may lie in the fact that with a CD you get both the physical object and a licence to reproduce privately the intellectual property. The best analogy might be a book. IF someone copies the data on the CD (or photocopied the book) then people would lose out. But this is not the responsibility of the second purchaser, it is that of the seller. Whenever I've sold CDs (be it tat at car boot sales or rarities online) I have never kept a copy. No different from buying and selling second hand hifi.

 

[landzw]

I got into the hole iTunes thing in a big way, i had Apple TV's in every room with TV's and had iPod docks in 3 rooms, Apart from sync problems i had with Apple TV and some download problems with iTunes i found myself questioning what the devil was i doing.

Firstly i was paying more for films and music in a lower res and to top it of you had to pay extra for the storage, so for instant a HD movie of iTunes would cost £14 then the extra 4gig of storage would push an extra £2 ontop of the film, then to top it of when you have finish with say a TV series or a film you may not like you can't sell it on.

All Apple TV's apart from which will be going soon have been sold on and been replaced with Sony Blu Ray players which cost me half the price and all films are now brought in Blu Ray.

The iPod dock in the living room has been replaced with a Yamaha HiFi system so i can start listening to CD's and i can rip what i need

 

[MajorFubar]

Yep a dose of common sense is not a bad thing, especially if you want more functionality than iTunes, iPods and docks will give you. Even if iTunes offered true lossless 16/44 downloads, it would still often be cheaper to actually buy the CD and rip it. I will continue to buy CDs, both new and used, until true hi-res downloads become standard. I won't hold my breath.

 

[landzw]

Yep a dose of common sense is not a bad thing, especially if you want more functionality than iTunes, iPods and docks will give you. Even if iTunes offered true lossless 16/44 downloads, it would still often be cheaper to actually buy the CD and rip it. I will continue to buy CDs, both new and used, until true hi-res downloads become standard. I won't hold my breath.

But with even Hi Res music you pay over the odds as you still take up hard drive space and it would also be a good idea to have a backup copy. Its going to be interesting to see peoples reactions when they have brought one of these new music streamers or one with a built in hdd and it fails and you lose everything.

 

[g777o]

I bought some second hand CD's in HMV the other day for £2 each.

I wonder if they give any of the profits to the Artist?

 

[chebby]

Its going to be interesting to see peoples reactions when they have brought one of these new music streamers or one with a built in hdd and it fails and you lose everything.

Only the ones who think... "backups are for wimps".

 

[MajorFubar]

Yep a dose of common sense is not a bad thing, especially if you want more functionality than iTunes, iPods and docks will give you. Even if iTunes offered true lossless 16/44 downloads, it would still often be cheaper to actually buy the CD and rip it. I will continue to buy CDs, both new and used, until true hi-res downloads become standard. I won't hold my breath.

But with even Hi Res music you pay over the odds as you still take up hard drive space and it would also be a good idea to have a backup copy. Its going to be interesting to see peoples reactions when they have brought one of these new music streamers or one with a built in hdd and it fails and you lose everything.

At least there is a perception that you're getting a better-than-CD file for your extra money. As for making back-up copies of your music, high-res or not, I'm really not sure where the law stands. Anyone with their heads screwed on the right way surely has made at least one backup of their valuable purchases, yet that doesn't mean it's strictly legal. It would need to be a funny law that has no problem with backing up your digital downloads but which still frowns at you for ripping your CDs for personal use.

 

[MajorFubar]

Didn't say I agreed with the price of HiRes downloads, I just said at least there's a perception you're getting more for your money. Anyhow, I don't really see £20 as too expensive for a premium product. We pay less now for music than probably we ever have. 25 years ago it was routinely £7 for a new LP and £13 for a CD. We've just got used to them being cheap. Add inflation to the price of a premium LP from the 60s and they'd be about £30 each.

 

[6th.replicant]

Indeed. And as for the price of hi-res downloads... |(

I can kind of forgive that, to an extent; I would expect to pay a premium to download something with a potentially-superior SQ to physical CD, even if the cost of hosting it and streaming it is no greater than a CD-quality stream. But paying more to download a compressed version just goes against my grain.

Nope, sorry, an all-too typical £18 for a hi-res DL - ergo, double the price of a new-release CD - is wepaons'-grade chutzpah.

However, the £11.99 that Muse are charging for a 24/96 of their new album, The 2nd Law, is fair doos :clap:

 

[Overdose]

Didn't say I agreed with the price of HiRes downloads, I just said at least there's a perception you're getting more for your money. Anyhow, I don't really see £20 as too expensive for a premium product. We pay less now for music than probably we ever have. 25 years ago it was routinely £7 for a new LP and £13 for a CD. We've just got used to them being cheap. Add inflation to the price of a premium LP from the 60s and they'd be about £30 each.

And didn't you ever wonder why, when CDs are easier and cheaper to produce than vinyl? The music industry might not be in the state it's in now, were it not for its own greed.

 

[MajorFubar]

True enough. But £20 for what is supposed to be a premium product, better than CD quality, is still OK in my book. If you look at it in terms of how it compares to the price of a decent meal at a good restaurant, or half a dozen pints down the pub, it doesn't look bad value.

 

[6th.replicant]

Premium, shmeemium - t's still a con. In addtion to the cost-saving regarding packaging/warehousing/distribution, if it's a contemporary or recent-ish recording, then there's even less work involved because a 24/96 or 24/192 is the studio's off-the-desk format - thus, the time/cost of downsampling is removed.

Let's see if Muse's £12 for a 24/96 has an effect...

 

[Andrew Everard]

Looking back 30 years to the launch of CDs – as I have been doing quite a bit of late – shows that 'bestseller' titles were being discounted to £9.99, or about £27.30 in today's terms, while premium titles, such as the Telarc releases, were £16.95, which would today be the equivalent of just over £47.

 

[Alec]

We pay less now for music than probably we ever have. 25 years ago

This, which begs the question why are we...no, I can't be bothered.

Oh, and the The Good Prof's first sentence in this thread.

 

[MajorFubar]

[snip]...such as the Telarc releases, were £16.95, which would today be the equivalent of just over £47.

Slight subject change but tell you what, absolutely no one could complain about those CDs having a restricted dynamic range. I bought Star Tracks I & II and Time Warp, all by the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra conduced by Erich Kunzel, as well as Holst's Planets, André Previn conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. They go from being drowned out by the clock-ticking to window-shaking levels in seconds. I really cannot imagine anything being engineered like that today. There's even a warning in the sleeve-notes about their wide DR, advising you to begin at really low levels so you don't blow your speakers during the crescendos. Can't imagine such a warning these days either!

 

[Anonymous]

Slightly off track but I use Amazon downloads. I've paid around £5.00 as I'm loathe pay £8.99 on Itunes for new download releases. US pays less, as always. The Great British rip off.