What is the right price for music?

Source: Digital Music News

What is the right price for music? It is a great question to ask everyone who are in the recording industry and consumers who listens to them. It is sad to see when everything else is getting more expensive as time goes, music gets cheaper and cheaper. It is even to a point cheaper than a cup of coffee.

Amazon.com often offers a special daily deals of an album right below $3 for digital downloads, Best Buy and many other retailers sell new release CD right below $10, and I think new LP with free digital download of the album is around $20. In a letter from Sufjan Stevens from Asthmatic Kitty Records (follow the source link) wrote

we personally feel that physical products like EPs should sell for around $7 and full-length CDs for around $10-12 We think digital EPs should sell for around $5 and full-length digital albums for something like $8.

It sounds about right with the pricing, but i personally think whether it is digital or a physical CD the price should be same at $7 for EP, $10 for a CD, and $12 for a special edition. In order to push this price plans, individual song sale price needs to be raised too. $2.99 for feature songs and $1.99 for any other songs. It may sound too expensive, but in reality there are millions of purchase a day in app stores and they don’t complain much about price they pay. Eventually record labels need to turn into marketing companies as technology develops and easy of release albums through many different formats. They dont’ need this giant distributors but they still need a company to market them. When consumers know purchasing an album doesn’t really help artists they loves to listen to, $2.99 a song will sound too much but let’s say 30% go to iTuens/Amazon, 30% record label, and 40% to the artist should be enough to encourage fans to purchase albums and songs.

Yeah, instead of a giant advances paying money for recording and all, but spend a lot of money in marketing only. Since artist’s portion of royalty at 40% is great enough to recoup the costs of marketing easily and after all fans will purchase music they like, record labels make money without too much of risks, and artists don’t have to only look for a giant advanced but enjoy writing new songs and engaging with fans.