Thoughts on the pricing of digital music downloads
This morning, the EMI Group announced that they would begin offering their music library for sale online without DRM. Not only that, but the DRM-free files would be encoded at a higher bitrate than their “protected” counterparts. Of course, this comes with a cost. Rather than the now-standard $0.99 per song, these files (which certainly do offer more to the consumer) would be priced at $1.29 per song.
As I was reading this, I began to think about what the real value of a digital music purchase is and whether the current pricing model makes sense, so I looked up the numbers. What follows are my results.
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