Just how do you divvy up a download? Photograph: AFP/Getty
Remember the time when albums cost £14.99 - take it or leave it - and came not from Tesco or your computer, but shops designed specifically to sell them?
For the music business, floundering through the uncharted seas of the digital age, those days seem like a distant golden memory. The price of physical CDs has dropped to as little as £5 per album, which is unsustainably cheap, according to record retailers, who are being hugely undercut by the supermarkets. But now the industry finds itself having to justify the price of downloading.
It costs 79p to download a track from iTunes, but even that is considered too much by users of illegal filesharing services, who are accustomed to getting music for free. They claim that, because downloading cancels out costly overheads such as pressing CDs and shipping them to stores, labels must be making a pile from each 79p download. So what are they doing with all the cash? Are artists getting a bigger cut, or is it all funnelled directly into the labels' coffers?
The music industry will put across its side of the story next week, when the networking organisation Music Tank hosts a conference titled The Great Digital Debate: How Do You Divvy Up A Download?. It aims to account for the 79p charge, and investigate whether it's in the best interests of artists, consumers and the industry itself. Don't be surprised if there's also some to-ing and fro-ing on the tortuous subject of whether record companies are still necessary at a time when bands such as Koopa can chart without being signed to a label at all.
The music industry's defence goes something like this: an MP3 may be just a digital file that doesn't even include artwork, but labels still have to pay for marketing, publicity and fleets of radio and TV pluggers. With their whole income derived from CD/download sales - labels don't get a cut of artists' tour or merchandising profits - the margins on 79p are perilously slim, so dropping the price further isn't really an option.
Furthermore, the utopian idea of bands self-financing releases through the internet wouldn't be viable in the long term: if labels no longer existed, artists would need to find other ways of attracting press, taking their songs to radio and so forth, and that would inevitably lead back to a label-style structure.
Maybe the music industry has a point. What else of worth can you buy for 79p? Why does nobody complain about paying £6.99 for a paperback book?
Can you really claim that a song you've absolutely got to have (even if you fall out of love with it the very next day) isn't worth a measley 79 pence?
