Would slashing the price of music albums to £1 help reduce online piracy?

You would just have been a twinkle in your Father's sperm then, but back in the late 60s/early 70s, CBS (Atlantic did it as well) had this brilliant plan of releasing "Sampler" Albums.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fill_Your_Head_with_R...

If the standard cost of an Album was, say, £3 at the time, these were released at around £1, and all my School Peers bought them, then bought additional Albums from the Artists that featured on them. It was far superior to "Now this is what I call Music", and surely there must be a Market for it today, or is YouTube doing the job for them.

Sprat to catch a Mackerel?

Seems once the price goes below a threshold the hope is the product would be sold multiple times over . This is just an indication of a demand curve in economics - if CDs are £10 then 10,000 units would be sold at £100 200 units would be sold etc .

Music companies spend fortunes protecting their interests and I suppose by setting the price at £1 for a CD album they would shift 100,000 units and the likelihood of the pirates copying content and making a living from selling CDs for 50p or 20p would be minimal - end of the piracy issue for cds and then the pirates would move onto DVDs and BluRays . This would end the piracy trade for CDs overnight .

Finally , If the new price structure were incorporated the music industry would make lots of cash from old recordings . Music companies have made multiple cash from the same music being on a different medium I would never cry for these companies , they have sold music on vinyl , cassette , 8-track , mini-disk , laser-disc , cds and now downloads .

The music industry was too slow to realise the way things were going.

One of the things I remember with fondness was going to Tower Records in Singapore after school and checking out various tracks that were newly in. The people that worked there knew their music and were chatty and informative. Sometimes I would see releases of music that others in the family liked. I'd call them and maybe buy it to save them time. It was a way of life that is no more with the virtual collapse of outlets like Tower Records and the others.

Once things migrated online I could no longer buy stuff that I wanted easily. Even iTunes did not sell to us in Singapore for years.

And then like many others I was suddenly aware that a lot of the new stuff was aimed at very young kids and most of the other stuff were releases of old recordings.

Reducing prices as a counter to online piracy is a little too late since most of the shops that would have sold these CD's are gone.

the only real business solution in to days hi-tech age is to separated intellectual price from media price,to some extent that's already been done by download sites like iTunes (but at rip off prices) no one will stop music piracy it's a lot older than the net.

every one has benefited form file share regardless of them actually shading or not your link is another example of this.

yeah cheer up the Music industry will try an old favourite soon and change the medium so you'll all have to re buy "money can't buy you love" and "imagine: there's no repossessions" all over again.

click click... at ya,,

yes i agree with it .i also believe that cds are not the future.people should pay £1 a album download .why will someone pay £15 for a cd if they can waste 5 minutes and download it for free? the only way kids would spend money on a album these days is if the assle of paying £1 will be less than them having to look for it on P2P programmes.

I understand that lots of people would lose money like this ,but maybe its the industry way of paying writers and contributors that needs to be updated

Some are not worth £1

File sharers have no interest in paying anything. They believe they are in the right and that's it. The cost you are suggesting is unsustainable in the business world. Anyway, why should they drop their prices just because people are hell bent on breaking the law. If they could successfully prosecute people, then that would be the way forward.

Yes it would especially since it would be an original, but the problem is

the artists are greedy and they would not agree to it.

Yes, it would...something better than nothing...

: )