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Originally Posted by Doug Johnson
How many people buy entire CDs worth of music online? Do most buy entire albums or just their favorite tracks? This could have a huge impact on how much profit is made.
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That is precisely at the heart of the debate.
Accusations of greed aside, the studios have found that flat-rate pricing means folks pay a buck each for the hits on an album and don't even bother with the rest of the tracks; they never get to sample them to even see if they're any good or not.
So, from their point of view, they're losing a $10-12-sale in favor of one or two $1 sales.
Hence the desire for variable pricing; hit singles at $1.5 and album cuts/older tracks at a lower rate, to try to incentivize the purchase of the full album or at least get closer to the $4 per album profit mark.
For me, since I don't much go for hit singles, variable pricing might actually mean significant savings if hit singles go up and obscure albums come down.
<shrugg>
The whole thing is a tempest in a teapot, anyway, as long as CDs remain the dominant (by far) means of music distribution.