The CD was supposed to bring album prices way lower than vinyl ones. One of the main point of the introduction of this new support wasn’t just that the sound quality was superior or that it was more practical to skip songs. The CD was supposed to answer the high production cost of the vinyl that was making music expensive.
But they fucked us. Maybe because people were so psyched about CDs, they believed that it was a high end product (though CD players were not that expensive in the 90s). The music industry certainly played on that, making the CD a weird combination of luxury and convenience (all CD players are pretty much producing the exact same sound compared to vinyl). They just didn’t reflect the price cut the technological innovation brought. Actually albums were more expensive on CD than on vinyl. And it didn’t change over time, my first new CD I bought was 21 euros in 1993/94, in 2003 it was 23 euros for a new release and still an average price of 20 bucks today, when the optical support cost is trivial.
The greedy bastards from the RIAA enjoyed the 90s, the decade where they became insanely rich by not only screwing artists over but also consumers and music lovers. They profited this for years as we didn’t know and didn’t have the choice to buy music. After the all Napsternet affair, it was over.
They panicked, sued listeners, discovered singers on YouTube, competed and killed indies.
Today despite true freedom for a lot of artists, the market is a mess.
Scary
For an artist the more convenient it is to access people with your music, the less you make money! How is that?? Today a solo artist needs 143 self-pressed CDs a month @ 9.99 to make the US monthly minimum wage. Or for the same $1,160, about 4,549,020 plays per month on Spotify. That’s quite a lot of work to barely live. During that time Lady Gaga sells a full LP for a dollar on Amazon. How can you compete with your EP-sans-marketing at 5 bucks?
So not only they ruin people’s lives for a few downloads on the internet, not only they screwed so many artists for decades it’s just impossible to track how deep and how far they went (which big artist doesn’t have a history of problems with labels and contracts), but now they also sell music at a price where an indie musician just can’t compete because they’re flooding the market and eyeballs.
I swear, I don’t see why I would give these people money through Amazon/iTunes etc. It sickens me to know that if I buy a Billy Preston’s track the money goes where it shouldn’t, to some rich ass executive somewhere on the RIAA planet. It’s just wrong. They are sharks, there’s no way for me now to buy any kind of music online when it’s RIAA-approved. They will not receive my money for a god damn mp3 file. Fuck that.