The price of music...

Well, many online stores have been selling music for $0.99/track lately as a buffer zone against piracy. This seems like an appropriate price to us, based on a 5 minute song with decent airplay. The RIAA (villians that they are) are trying to increase that to 2 or more dollars.

There's another semi-related side to this issue, what about interlude tracks? Many albums have tracks that are little snippets of speech, or otherwise interspersed between the actual music. Should we pay the same buck for them? Of course not.

The solution is relatively simple. Full album prices should be set at a reasonable 10 to 15$, depending on the relative strength of the album. New releases from famous artists will cost more, and on down to about $5 for the lesser known and/or older works (and some should be less than that). If we let the record company decide these prices, but insist they cover the gamut, both they and we should be satisfied at the results.

Corrospondingly, individual tracks should be based upon their popularity by way of an automatic download/purchase tracker. The more people buy X, the more X costs, up to about 3 bucks or so. This allows the record companies to get the best price for their most important tracks (without going overboard) and lets us determine our own prices based on how much the music is actually worth to us. If we must have the latest thing, right now, we can pay extra. This is fair.

Consumers as a group will be able to determine the price for a given piece as well. If something is really good enough to warrant it, people will be willing to pay more and the price will rise. This also provides a de-facto rating system which could be used in all other sorts of ways to help guide music along the path where people wish to follow.

The record companies will have to set a base price on tracks, like a dime, to cover the actual distribution costs, but allowing cheap distribution for unknown tracks improves their bottom line for those tracks infinately (they get Nothing right now) and gives them the capability of rising through the ranks if they're really good.

Another good side-effect of this plan is to lessen the power of their publicity. When people can search by popularity, they're going to be more willing to look through the stacks to find out why their favorite artists other 8 songs off the album didn't make it to the top 500. In doing so, they'll be exposed to other music (and with a minor technical input, related sounding music of similar popularity).

In all, we wrestle with the record companies because we feel we have been overcharged for years. Buying an entire CD just because we like a couple of tracks on it is ludicrous. This solution may need a few bugs worked out, but has the best chance of balancing the interests of the RIAA, the artists, and ours as consumers, which are the most important of all.