The Way The Music Died

Okay, so Andrew Sullivan linked to this allegedly good article on why Compact Disks "died," but I haven't actually read it yet. Because I like to get all meta, I'd rather focus on the response Sullivan got from one of his readers on the subject (italics mine):

What he should really be writing about is the record companies' insane insistence on holding a high price-point with a whopping profit margin on CDs. When CDs are manufactured for a few pennies, and record companies are charging $10-15 each, after a few years, the snap-back of the market is going to happen, like it or not. In this case, the snap-back came in the form of iTunes and digital downloading, but when you overprice your product to that degree, and don’t offer consumers what they want — and record companies had been doing that for decades, forcing folks to buy albums, when people wanted singles, before CDs even came along — it comes in the end.

This is kind of right, but I don't give Steve Jobs nearly as much credit here. The value proposition was, indeed, fucked, but the ready alternative to paying too much was paying nothing. Napster was what transformed the landscape, and had it never happened, I think the iTunes model might have been different. Then again, seeing as how the iTunes model is just a better version of the original pre-Napster eMusic model, maybe not.

My point is, the fact that the alternative to paying too much for a CD was paying nothing was largely immaterial. If it had just been paying less, it still would have been disruptive. And likewise, had CD prices come down over the course of twenty years, the disparity between paying for a CD and not paying anything might not have been quite so jarring.

So maybe I'm agreeing with the claim, but quibbling on semantics. And apparently Greg Kot is beating me to the punch on the book.