Dragaera

Artificial release dates and online publishing

Tue Dec 10 14:46:56 PST 2002

On Tue, Dec 10, 2002 at 05:41:59PM -0500, Randi128 at aol.com wrote:
> You are correct, not everyone who pirates a copy would have bought a retail 
> copy had the pirated copy not been available. But---- how else do you 
> determine the losses? If I sold 50 copies and 200 people pirated copies, I 
> would like to think that those people who pirated were just too cheap to pay 
> for their copies. 

Or maybe you're asking too much, and they don't think it's worth 
it.

> So---the market is there. If pirating is killing your 
> business, maybe your charging too much. A CD or book is only worth what 
> people are willing to pay for it. Maybe it would be better to decrease retail 
> price to capture those pirates money? 

Hell yes.

Sell CDs at $3/each and Napster will die even without the court 
cases.

> Teenagers who can afford to have a 
> system that can burn Cds and download Mp3's-----can't afford to buy music??? 

Their parents buy the computers.

How many many CDs can you buy for $50 (the cost of a cheap CD 
burner)?

> Don't value the music enough to pay for it is more like it. 

The price is too high.  $20 for a CD whose songs I can't preview, 
and isn't returnable?  Sorry, only a very few artists are 
consistent enough to be worth that.  Everybody else (particularly 
new artists that don't get radio time) is a $20 gamble, and I'm 
not a gamblin' man.

-- 
Matthew Hunter (matthew at infodancer.org)
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