I don't want to cheapen it. Good recorded music has an inherent value. For the price of a decent dinner one can enjoy a good recording for years and years. While the costs for pressing a CD are very low, the price for promoting a CD is very high. And the sweat and passion that goes into it . . . well . . . it's worth something.
So how do we set the price? $8.95? Really? Is that the key?
Even on ebay where I have gotten some hard to find used disks I'm paying $10 or more + shipping. I don't know what a fair price could be, but $17 is pretty steep when you consider most of the disks I buy are just digital versions I've already got on vinyl. New music, forget it, it's not worth it.
Bottom line, I'd say $10 or $11 is reasonable, I know you have to make money so the music industry are the ones who should come down in price.
I was one of the early-adopters of CD's in the mid 80's, back when the CD rack (yes, one SMALL rack) was dwarfed by vinyl and cassettes. $10.99 was the highest price for a single CD and most were $8.99 and $9.99. That was kind of high for the day, but then there were only 2 or 3 places in the country could make CD's. But the quality was much better than the alternatives, so I payed it. Now it costs pennies to make and package one, and they charge twice as much.
When CD's started costing me $16, $17 and $18 I quit buying them. I bought quite a few of the 3" CD's because I wasn't going to spend close to $20 for one good song and 10 tracks of over-produced crap, but the small CD's are hard to find for the music I want. I do download and burn my own CD's, but it's almost exclusively older stuff that I baught on cassette years ago and have since worn-out.
I'll still buy an occasional CD...but it has to be a damn good CD for what the industry is charging. Napster and all of it's bastard step-children have the potential to really revolutionize the distribution end of music. Keep the charge per track reasonable and everyone wins. The consumer gets just the music they want at a fair price without paying for pretty packaging and retail mark-ups, and the industry can completely eliminate the money they spend on cranking out the CD's, packaging them, shipping, loss to defects and damage in transit...we're talking about a lot of money!