[Centurion2000]

<I was paying $7.98 back in the mid 1970's for an album. $5 doesn't begin to cover costs, quite honestly, even for a do-it-yourself-er studio.

CD's cost pennies. A single mp3 should not cost more than the CD to put it on. If they were pennies or a quarter each, people would buy in much greater volume.

The music industry and artists just need to find the optimal point on their equivalent Laffur curve to generate the max revenue. If you make it cheap enough that the time invovled in music piracy is not worth it, users will buy the music instead. There's your maximum revenue point.

There 300 million people in this country. If over half of them have PC's and you get just 10% of them downloading the song for a dime or a quarter. That's 150K to 600K. Pretty good wages for a bard.

[NotJustAnotherPrettyFace]

Each song on that CD is worth $.09 that SHOULD GO straight back to the copyright holder, according to the US congressional statutory law. If a CD is "worth pennies" then 10 songs on that CD are worth at LEAST $.90 that should go straight back to the songwriters.

BTW, what songs have you written? Do you have any concept of the "value" of music?

[RobRoy]

I'm in a band. I like to watch other bands. But paying for pre-recorded music is Soooooo 20th century. We are back to the 19th, 18th, 17th, etc. century models. Musicians get paid for performing.

Pre-recorded music is something you listen to on the radio, on a bus or in an elevator. It's a free commodity.