The cost of a CD is coming down.

[mainedish]

Universal is lowering the cost of a CD . You can thank the file sharing programs for that. One thing never talked about is how many people get CD's from the local Library and copy them. Or buy the newest CD and copy it , keep the copy and sell the original on EBAY.

[James_F]

Nice, but its too late. The cat is already out of the bag and there is nothing the RIAA can do about it. CD's could be $5 each and people would still rather download them. This would have been a great move 3 years ago.

[mainedish]

But will anyone download on Kazaa after the lawsuits? Even if they close down on the Kazaa sites they still have to address the issue of making a copy of a cd and selling the original on Ebay.

[James_F]

You can't close Kazaa. Its legal. The act of sharing is not. You'd have to sue millions of people to stop it. I can't imagine that happening. Kazaa will pass and others will arrive that won't allow the RIAA to track users.

I personally think anyone who uses Kazaa is a thief, but I see no way for the RIAA to stop it unless they improve on the BuyMusic.com and iTunes.com sites.

[rcbridge]

It's about time the prices of CD's came down they promised us that more than 10 years ago, but if you have (had) a cash cow continue to milk it.

[Shel]

I agree, they are too expensive, but its still not going to stop people from downloading.

[dtcarson]

There's always going to be pirates, and while piracy certainly is wrong, I think that the music industry has very little to gain from their strongarm tactics recently. They'll bully the 12 year old kids and the grandparents into buying CD's [how many do they buy anyway?] again, but the people that the RIAA should *really* be after, who share thousands and thousands of tracks, are going to find another way. There has always been a big underground hacker element, and that spirit [rightly or wrongly] still exists. Many of those people will never pay a dime for a CD, but will continue to find alternate methods of transferring the files.
Not to mention, again, while downloading stolen Mp3s from filesharing programs is 'wrong' and illegal, I think the effect it has on the industry's bottom line is vastly overrated. Rather than the route they're taking, I think the industry would do better by trying to go after those people who sell CD's on the New York street corners, etc; the big overseas pirates who make a business out of it. I know we have jurisdictional issues with the companies producing these versions, but if they busted every one of those people on the street corners, eventually the US market for those HK versions would erode. But it's easier to go after a high school or college kid, I guess. Even if the RIAA/industry is 110% in the right, the 'perception' among many is going to be 'Quit picking on those kids, you big mean company with zillions of dollars.'
Not to mention the piracy the RIAA performs on its artists, and it's shoveling millions of CD's worth of crap over to us via the, what, three channels music legally gets to us? [radio, Best Buy, and Musicland type stores.]
Again, not that that excuses piracy, and I normally don't blame the victim, but the RIAA/music industry has had this coming for a long time.
I remember when CD's first came out; it was all hyped up, CD's will be cheaper than cassettes since they're easier to make! Um, yeah...now, full blown DVD's are cheaper than CD's. I wandered into Sam Goody last week, and they wanted 18.00 for Ozzy Osbourne--Blizzard of Ozz. The album's what, 20 years old? It wasn't even the 'gold remastered' edition. And if I had asked for Christian Death [theirs was actually the last CD my household has bought, I got it for a Christmas present two Christmases ago], Inkubus Sukkubus, or almost anything other than the 'mainstream' [ie boy bands and 16 year old girls who dress like tramps], I probably would have given the guy an embolism. Again, a store should stock what sells, but the industry hasn't exactly been forthcoming with spreading any original/creative music, so many people, especially people who have other sources of info/music [ie, the internet], have given up on the 'official' music industry.

[Steve Mehs]

Hopefully this will lead to the cost decline among the multichannel formats. Why do I get nearly all my songs exclusively from Kazaa? Because I feel the quality is close enough to CD quality. I would never in my life by a CD (even if $5) that's not a CD-R, but yet I shelled out $25 for The Beach Boys Pet Sounds Album on DVD-A from Media Play, that I got mainly for the song Sloop John B. I have 4 DVD-As totaling nearly $100. That's how the RIAA will get me to buy music, DVD-A and eventually SACD, otherwise it's Kazaa. I'm more then willing to pay for higher quality, but the industry isn't giving me much to work with in the categories of current and classic rock.