I think the mean price per song is certainly less than $1.50 over my entire music collection.
That assumes an average $15 for CDs with an average of 10 songs on them. At that price, I get the original uncompressed audio, FLAC files for digital storage, and whatever lossy transcoded files I might like to put on my player devices. And all of them are free of DRM, or at least freed from it at the ripping step.
In that light, to pay $1.50 for a digital download of a lossy-encoded file is pure madness. Despite the cost requirements of manufacturing, transporting, and distributing a physical medium, I still think the best value for buying licensed music performances is to get the whole CD and process the digital files yourself.
And whenever I [rarely] buy digital downloads, I will only pay for lossless file formats. I might download a gratis MP3, but only as a means to determine whether I might like to buy the album, or if there is literally no better way to get that recording.
I simply don't trust the digital music distributors to defend my interests in this industry.
That assumes an average $15 for CDs with an average of 10 songs on them. At that price, I get the original uncompressed audio, FLAC files for digital storage, and whatever lossy transcoded files I might like to put on my player devices. And all of them are free of DRM, or at least freed from it at the ripping step.
In that light, to pay $1.50 for a digital download of a lossy-encoded file is pure madness. Despite the cost requirements of manufacturing, transporting, and distributing a physical medium, I still think the best value for buying licensed music performances is to get the whole CD and process the digital files yourself.
And whenever I [rarely] buy digital downloads, I will only pay for lossless file formats. I might download a gratis MP3, but only as a means to determine whether I might like to buy the album, or if there is literally no better way to get that recording.
I simply don't trust the digital music distributors to defend my interests in this industry.