So this isn't directly 313 but close enough.
Martin said:
"But I do feel this is to the advantage of the smaller player like Warp, but
look who they have to deal with as well, US - 192K bitrate!!! Up yours "
So what's the best balance between cost and quality?
The problem is purely economic. Data costs money to send, about a cent for one
megabyte.
So to sell one MP3 file of eight megabytes (a typical five minute track at
190kbps) costs eight cents purely in data costs. Add on the cost of maintaining
the website, and the cost of making sure that the artist gets their share of the
sale. Suddenly that 99 cent song you just bought has a cost of 50 cents. Split
that 50/50 with the artist and everyone makes 25 cents. As you can see nobody
is going to get rich any time soon.
Now using a lossless codec will reduce the file size maximum by 50%, this is the
best case. So the same song above suddenly is 40 megabytes, and costs 40 cents
to transfer, which means that the 99 cent song actually costs 86 cents.
As you can see it's more expensive, so you have to charge $1.50 for the song,
but that's a lot of money for one song, especially when people think about how
much a CD cost. One song $1.50, ten songs on a CD, that's still $15, same price
as a CD, people will be pissed that you are trying to rip them off.
It's also more risky. If you are downloading your 40 megabyte "Lossless" song
and halfway through the connection breaks, then it has to be downloaded again,
adding 20 cents to the cost. And we know that connections break often enough
for this to be a problem.
I would be very interested to hear any ideas to work around this problem.
Tosh
