Quote:
Originally Posted by jihadjoe75  Work is slow right now and I feel like ranting...
I'm a college student who makes $8 an hour for my campuses IT support dept and quite frankly, I cannot afford to pay $10-$20 for a CD. Yep, I'm a pirate and I have been for a very long time. Although I do buy music on occasion. [...] |
Joe
I'm sympathetic on some levels... I think most music is priced too high considering the cost of production and distribution. (Marketing costs, of course, often drive superstar pricing up. But, you know, if it takes all that
marketing to get folks to buy the music, I kind of would feel like a sucker even bothering, you know?
)
But...
I'm
also on an
extremely tight budget -- I don't go out for entertainment, I don't
eat out, not even fast food (exception is the occasional $1 Wendys burger when I'm out in the world), and I almost never buy CDs.
But I get access to an ENORMOUS range of music every month through a Rhapsody subscription for less than the price of
one CD. I can hear almost anything I want to hear. (And the few holdouts tend to be dinosaurs I was sick of decades ago.)
But let me pull an
old guy and tell you about how I built my LP collection when I was little kid:
Though I lived in a comfortable above-middle class neighborhood, I mowed lawns and sold cleaning products and greeting cards door to door to support my hi fi gear and vinyl habit.
The average record in those days cost $4 or $5 [this was the era before chain record discount stores, which
temporarily dropped the average price down to about $3 -- until the little indie stores were driven out of business and
then they started ratcheting prices up higher than ever]... but some of my favorites cost a full $5.99...
Doesn't sound like much? Well that was 1964. Adjust $5.99 for inflation and you have
$41.20. For 10 or 12 songs.
And it was uphill both ways to school. In the snow...