How much will you pay for a 16bit/44kHz download?
Posted by: engjoo on 02 July 2013
Just curious.
If say a CD cost $10, how much will you consider paying for its download?
That is considering you are perfectly comfortable ripping your own CDs. To put it another way, what cost savings do you think is justifiable in order to forgo a hardcopy of the CD itself.
We are comparing only 16bit/44kHz downloads here.
-30% less would be a deal for me.
But on the other side if you take a look at the cost structure of the 10$ the majority of the cost creating factors are eliminated.
So the music should cost less than 50% of the price. (This will never happen)
Hard to say, often when a download is available there is also a 24 bit version available, but at a sometimes e.g. unreasonable price. With standard cds I always look for a used copy at Amazon or a used copy on www.murfie.com. Murfie holds the cd you Buy in the US and makes a flac uncompressed rip available.
I will not pay the same price that a company would charge for a cd, unless it means I can save international postage costs and I cannot get the disk another way. With a digital version there are costs associated with keeping at least one backup of the file, and if possible 2 backups the other away from your home.
Interesting to watch this evolve, with Amazon now offering free shipping on basically everything and the "auto rip" service.
Nonesuch, which I think is a great label, has a structure like $10 MP3 (320 I think), $13 for the 44.1 FLAC, then $16 for CD + MP3. Some albums are $10, 11, 12 in the back list. I wish they'd offer high res as well.
I'm a subscriber to B&W society of sound, which I think is not quite a good deal ($60/year I think gets you 2 new albums a month + access to their library.) I keep thinking about how much I'd pay for high res access to an entire catalog from a band or album....
I would pay $0 for mp3 downloads. Actually, not even that. You'd have to pay me to download mp3s.
Spotify at $10/month gives me access to all the mp3s music that I can wish for - and I don't need to bother with file management.
If I like something, I buy the CD and rip to wav.
On the other hand, I do find HiRes prices just a rip off too.
I would never buy a download if there was the chance to buy the CD issue.
If not then the price might be high, if it were something special.
ATB from George
I would not pay a penny for a download. Last CD I bought was CCR Cosmo's Factory 40th Anniversary issue new from a brick & mortar store for $5. Great SQ true to the original vinyl with numerous photos, extensive liner notes, and a great reproduction of the blue Fantasy Records label on the CD.
I have never paid for a download either.
My strategy is to pay for downloads where either (a) the download is at better than CD quality, or (b) it is no worse than 16/44, and a fair bit cheaper than the CD, and the sleeve-notes are available as part of the package. I am mostly talking about classical stuff here. And I agree that a lot of hi-res stuff is at rip-off prices at the moment. Hopefully that will improve.