allflac

Pricing is a completely different subject - and you would indeed normally expect different vendirs to offer at different orices, and if not that smacks of price fixing which I thought was illegal in UK (same comments apply to hifi kit...)

What is unacceptable, and encourages/supports piracy, is unreasonable charging: why does a download cost as much as a physical CD, when there is no physical disk to press, booklet to print, box, storage space for stock? It should be significantly less to download, maybe only half tbe price. And why do hi def albums cost more? From digital recordings there is actually less to do in makibg the file available for download at the native bitrate and depth, though to balance that filesize is greater requiring greater storage capacity, though trivial given today's cheap hard disks. And why significantly different cost in different countries for the same album from the same multinational vendor, other than the effect of possible different tax regimes- which would affect all albums similarly.

People could be forgiven for thinking it is the vendors who are raking it in, and believing that a cheaper vendor from another country simply has a lower profit margin and maybe subject to lower taxes (said never having looked at allflac, nor heard of it before this thread)

Disagree on one point IB,  pricing is a related subject & in my opinion its the excess shown in the variables from the "established" vendors that encourages pirates. Lower pricing will not stop them,  but a more level price variation across the board & showing a degree of competitiveness would make the consumer more trusting of the vendors & less liable to look around;  then it might not be so lucrative for pirates.  

Competition would normally encourage lower prices, while different retailers might try to encourage sales tgrough different incentives, some discounting particular lines  to low profit margins while keeping othes high enough for net profitability, while other retailers will go for a flat rate profit, and tgen there are membership schemes etc. But price variability is precisely what you expect and you then shop around for the best bargain, unless or untill someone comes in screwing the profit margins down to an absolute minimum undercutting everyone else until either the others come diwn to the same price or  go out of business (or the undercutter gets it wrong and goes out of business). That ability to shop around and buy the one that is cheapest is there, highlighted by the figures you posted: very simple, shop around just like with anything else if you want to save money: it is the market economy at work.

my point about encouraging piracy was the high prices charged. There has been much criticism of this in Britain for many years, though admittedly CDs are now far cheaper in relative terms than when they were £10 each in the 1980s, but downloads should be far cheaper than CDs, and hi def should not be even more expensive: it is that that I was suggesting encourages or supports piracy.  I suspect many who go for pirated copies, and the small-time piraters that are not associated with any form of crime syndicates but simply copy friends' music, would be far less likely to di so if they perceive the cost of legitimate purchase to be a fair rate for what they get.  It is the same with computer software.

jfritzen posted:

What guarantee is there that HDTracks, Qobuz and others are really legit? I don't doubt that it's OK to buy from them, but there is probably no way these sites can prove to a customer that they are entitled to sell third party music?

Thats stupid ... they might not be willing to prove it to you as a customer, but they can prove it by the contracts they have with the rights holders (directly or indirectly).

jfritzen posted:

What guarantee is there that HDTracks, Qobuz and others are really legit? I don't doubt that it's OK to buy from them, but there is probably no way these sites can prove to a customer that they are entitled to sell third party music?

Probably because they are based in countries within which content owners, in the past, have successfully sued Joe Bloggs sat at his PC using bittorrent for thousands of pounds.   I doubt very much that well promoted online companies would escape record companies looking for their pound of flesh if they were not legitimate.

Another concern with pirate sites is self-extracting archives...  You download the file and trigger the archive to extract the playable files, which it does; along with a nice little polymorphic virus!

Of course on a Mac any file can be flagged as executable, so it may be possible to put the virus code into 'comment' blocks in the playable music file and execute it from there, so reducing the possibility of the virus being discovered by the user.