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Just another reason to not buy any CD'S from the record companies. If the record companies were not so greedy, they may actually improve their sales base. I think they need a lesson in economics. Mainly, when sales are bad, you don't raise the price of CD'S, you lower them. THis will generate more sales and generate more people buying them. Any other logic makes no sense. It's like your cable company raising the price for cable because he is losing customers. Well why do you think he is losing customers? Because the price is too high! If he wanted to add customers, he would lower the price. Excuses just don't fly in this situation. Companies raise prices because they are trying to stick it to the little person. Let's take a lesson is economics and learn that when sales are bad, you lower prices, not raise them.

How are they supposed to learn this with the "supply/demand" balance being upset by "free" supplies?

The rip-off artists and thieves have done the music consumer far more harm than good--not that they'd care. They exhibit the sort of nihilistic, hyper-"me" generation tendencies that used to be the exclusive purview of the Left, but is now championed even by some here on FR, who you'd think would know better.

I think $5 is the magic pricepoint at which people will decide the hassle of downloading and burning their own CDs is not worth it. Let's face it, it's a pain-in-the-neck to put together a CD off the web. You have to find and locate decent copies each individual song. Many MP3s are of poor quality or they are incomplete. Then you end up with a CD that either has magic marker written on it (most people label their CDs this way) or a cheesy label from one of those CD-labeling kits. BTW, it is almost impossible to get the font size small enough to fit all the artist and track information on these homemade labels. Not to mention the cost of printer ink and labels (not cheap).

I have a vast CD collection and I tell you, I would much rather have the genuine article than these homemade CDs. You get the liner notes, artwork and a professionally burned CD that I believe will hold up better in the long run than what you can make at home. I also like the idea of the recording artist making the few pennies on it that the RIAA pays out.

If the recording industry made the price of a CD $5, they would easily make up in volume what they lose in per-unit revenue. Remember when VCR tapes costed $90 for one movie? Now they sell at Wal-Mart for $10 and they sell in the millions and millions.

Of course, the recording industry would have get efficient and downsize. They'd have to cut out all the middlemen from their antiquated and corrupt distribution system.

If the recording industry doesn't change, they are going to die. People now realize how badly they have been getting ripped off all these years. Speaking as one who used to buy over 100 CDs a year, I'll never buy more than a handful a year anymore now that I know I can get a stack of 100 blank CDs for the price they are currently charging for a single pre-recorded CD. I'm an honest consumer (I don't have any homemade CDs made from MP3s downloaded illegally off the web) but I'm not a stupid consumer.