h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

OK, rock stars, my argument goes like this:

15 years ago, I bought a VCR. It cost me £400 and it was good. It lasted 12 years. When it broke down and finally gave up the ghost, I bought a new one. Despite things like inflation and the fact that the new one had lots more features than the old one, the new one only cost £250. These days, again despite inflation and the fact that there are even more features, I could buy one for about £175.

In 1972, I could buy a copy of the Ziggy Stardust album for £2.25 These days, the same album (no extra features) costs about £16 or £17. I can buy a blank CD-R for about £0.80 What would you do?

Please don't tell me about marketing costs, JVC or whoever also have those, together with R&D, yet they still manage to get the prices to drop.

Technology increases, mass production increases, price decreases - its Sods Law number 484551688!

As for the Ziggy thing, it is now a collector's piece - the fewer there are, the more you have to pay. Thats the law of supply and demand.

Applies to you first Q really too!!
'G'

I never notice the price of albums dropping when they're at No.1

Even albums like Dark Side of the Moon and Rumours which stay in the charts for yonks still strangely keep a constant price.

BTW you can still buy a new copy of the Ziggy album. If the demand went up, they'd make more copies.

I dunno. There is a law suit in America by several states against the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). This consortium inclused all the biggest music production companies who together product more than 90% of the music here. The suit claims the RIAA fixed prices in retail stores and used illegal monopoly tactics to force the stores to comply with the artificially high prices. This has been going on for at least 5 years here.

The solution in America has been to flock to web sites like MP3.com and Napster.com to download the copyrighted music for free. The RIAA has, in turn, sued those web sites for copyright infringement. Eventually, the RIAA will have spent enough money in the American courts that they'll have to start making compromises. At least, that's the hope.

I'm not sure how much this reflects on the situation in the UK. But some of our music is imported and the RIAA likes to speak for the music industry where "standard pricing" is concerned, I thought you might find the information helpful.

Here in Britain we have a similar problem. Here, the gripe is that CDs cost more than they do in the States (I think even Europe is cheaper, but I'm not sure), and also more than the same music on cassette, in spite of the fact that both cost about the same to produce. The music industry naturally comes up with all sorts of reasons to justify the price difference. Recently I've taken to buying CDs online, whenever possible. I can save up to £5 per CD this way! (But I still reckon CDs are more expensive than they should be.)

It is actually much less expensive to produce music on CDs than on cassettes. The CDs costs less, the machines used to add the music to the medium cost less, the need for quality control is reduced, and the packing costs are far less. This is a clear case of the manufacturers refuseing to pass on savings to the customer.

The cost per CD is around 10p or less in bulk, otherwise newspapers, magazines and Internet companies wouldn't give so many away. The packaging probably costs more than the disc itself.

I presume the retail stores are taking a large slice of the retail price, so it's not just the massive publishing companies making a hefty profit.

Recently I bought the soundtracks for "Gladiator" and "The Rock" from HMV on-line. The HMV store prices were £16.99 and £15.99 respectively. I paid £11.99 each. That's a saving of £9 on just those two CDs, which meant that the other CD I ordered came free, and there was still enough left to pay some of the p&p costs. I appreciate that HMV have to pay their staff and that their stores have overheads, and not all the CDs you buy on-line have such a big saving. But multiply things up by the number of CDs HMV sell, and that's one heck of a profit.

And then there's PC games. When "Civilization: Call to Power" came out a year or two ago, it cost £35 - £40. I recently bought it from a high-street shop for £10. The same applies to "Populous - The Beginning" and "Populous: Undiscovered Worlds". I know that software companies have to recoup their development costs, and stores have to cover overheads, and both have to make a profit. But when you think about a 75% drop in price...

I can understand it somewhat with computer video games. The majority of overhead in video games is related to the production cost. Programmers and graphic artists are exensive these days. It takes at least 20 of these several months to produce your average game. The high-end equipment and software used to create the games is also quite expensive. The costs much be staggering, albeit on a smaller scale than movies.

Once the costs have been recouped and the initial release demand is down, at least the distributors do us the favor of lowering the price. When I was extremely strapped for cash, I could usually wait a year and get the game I wanted.

With a music CD, the studio equipment is now inexpensive enough to put into the homes of successful artists. You need a few musicians, and one or more people capable of properly mixing the tracks together. Even on my ordinary middle-class budget, I could probably find some talent and cut a few CD-quality tracks. There are enough people doing this and introducing their music over the internet to cast doubts upon the overhead of music publishers.

Meanwhile, we know the music industry is under-paying the talent where CD sales are concerned (at least in the US). We also know that albums from 20 years ago remain at the same price or higher than when they debuted.

I think my company (computer games publisher) gets roughly £10 of a £30-40 game - we pay for production, packaging, etc. A couple of years later, once the game's so old that no-one would buy it at full price anyway, I think we might get £1 or £2 per copy if we sell the rights to someone making game compilation CDs (when they pay for production, support, etc.)

Bear in mind that some games now on mega-discout might have been written in the early days of Windows 95, and might not even work properly on machines without DOS-level soundcard support, etc. Old graphic-intensive games might look seriously dated, and won't make use of fancy new hardware. We get quite a few people calling up asking why their latest bit of kit isn't supported, and who don't like the answer "Well, the game *was* written a couple of years before your equipment was invented"

If it *doesn't* work, the chances are good that there's no-one left in the tech support department who ever played the game when it was new. Unless it's a particularly popular game, it's unlikely that much effort would be put into keeping it compatible with future hardware, and the original programmers are quite possibly long gone to another company anyway.

With audio CDs, there isn't a similar time/increasing incompatibility element, so they don't drop in price like computer games.

With console games, the compatibility issue shouldn't arise, though the increase in the number of pirate and/or secondhand games after people get bored with them will have a strong effect on the long term saleability of even a console game.

I haven't bought a Single Since All the Small Things Came out. Now I just goto http://www.scour.com and download tracks for about 60p (the combination of BT and a 14.4kbps modem) rather than £2.99