On Tue, 2003-04-29 at 02:17, Daniel wrote: > And at AUD$1.50 a song approx, with ease of use, access to 200,000 songs > plus more added all the time,...I think it will go well. (Hopefully > it will get here faster than the iPhoto Book section!) ;o)
Ok, lets just do the maths on that. We'll do it first in US dollars, because the number is one that has been quoted: A song costs $US 0.99 A CD contains ~ 17 tracks, or $US 16.83 The current exchange rate is ~ 0.60 Thus a CD worth of songs costs: $AUD 28.05 Now in addition to this, you're also paying for bandwidth, because unlike purchasing the CD in the shop where the distribution network is paid for by the supplier, the electronic distribution is now paid for by you. Lets assume for a moment you have a basic ADSL account, lets say 256K download, with a 2Gb cap. Cost is $AUD 60.00 A song is roughly 3.5Mb (based on looking at the songs on my HD, guestimating an average size), thus with your 2Gb cap you can download about 580 songs. Thus each song also costs $AUD 0.10 in download charge. A 256K ADSL account has a throughput of about 25Kb per second. Thus each song will take just over 2 minutes to download. You save on time going to the shop and you save on your bus fare getting there. To download your CD would cost you around $AUD 29.75. You end up with a CD worth of music, which takes up around 60Mb of space on your hard disk. A 20Gb HDD costs around $100, so you can store around 60 CD's worth, or around 5850 songs. Cost per song: $AUD 0.02. So your CD has now cost: $AUD 28.05 charge to purchase $AUD 1.70 charge to download $AUD 0.34 charge to store Total: $AUD 30.09 For this $AUD 30.09 you get an electronic copy of a CD, with no media to use in your car (additional cost $0.50 for a Blank CD), no case to store it in (additional cost $1.00 for a case), no cover booklet (additional cost of $0.20), all for the convenience of electronic shopping. To top it off, if you haven't burned a CD of your tracks, if your hard disk crashes, or your files get accidentally deleted, you have nothing and you can pay for your music again. Contrast this with buying a CD in a store, which can cost you anywhere between $19.95 and $29.95, plus $1.50 for the bus. And finally, for the audio purists among us. We're not talking about CD quality music here, we're talking compressed MPEG. A CD quality download is 650Mb, thus you can only download 3 CD's for your $60. Making the download cost $20 per CD. It would also take nearly 7.5 hours per CD on your 256K ADSL account. As an aside, the electronic CD shop consists of an Internet connection, a server farm and software. The current method of distributing CDs involves printing CDs, booklets, boxes, posters. Shipping them across the globe, putting them into warehouses, shipping product to shops, stocking shelves and returning faulty CDs. Are the record companies excited - I would be if I could make money for nothing! So, perhaps it will go well. But at these prices I won't be a shopper. Disclaimer: All care has been taken to make these calculations accurate. One Australian dollar is calculated to buy 0.60 US dollars. 1Gb is 1024Mb, 1Mb is 1024Kb. A 256K download link is 25Kb/s effective throughput. A song size is guestimated at 3.5Mb. A CD is taken to have around 17 songs. -- Onno Benschop connected via Optus B3 from S28:44'05" - E114:37'15" (Geraldton, WA) -- ()/)/)() ..ASCII for Onno.. |>>? ..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 8888 - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
