The Economics Of Downloading

[richardfinegold]

I have ordered a few downloads recently, and noticed some pricing oddities that you veteran down loaders are probably acquainted with. I ordered the Nelsons/Boston Shosty 10th in High Rez. The album has 1 additional track, a brief excerpt from an Opera that Didn't want. On Presto Web Site the
Price for the whole album was $17.00; if I ordered each track individual track at $2.20, I purchased the Symphony for less than half the cost of the entire album. Even if I had separately purchased the unwanted Opera excerpt the savings were substantial .
I wanted to add a Bruckner cycle to the music stored on my phone. I found several cycles on Amazon where the MP3 were being offered at 3 times the price of the CD version. What a deal.

[Dave2002]

That anomaly seems unusual to me. Where there are lots of short tracks it's usually cheaper to buy the CD but if the tracks are very long, then the downloads can be cheaper.

A slightly different phenomenon occurs with sites such as emusic - they simply get the billing screwed up sometimes. I hesitate to say that it's a deliberate scam, though it feels like it sometimes, even though emusic does have some quite good stuff sometimes - albeit not always at the highest quality. Has anyone else used them and noted some very odd billing - such as being charged twice for the same subscription over several months?

I'm thinking of pulling the plug on them - finally and perhaps irrevocably.

[jayne lee wilson]

I have ordered a few downloads recently, and noticed some pricing oddities that you veteran down loaders are probably acquainted with. I ordered the Nelsons/Boston Shosty 10th in High Rez. The album has 1 additional track, a brief excerpt from an Opera that Didn't want. On Presto Web Site the
Price for the whole album was $17.00; if I ordered each track individual track at $2.20, I purchased the Symphony for less than half the cost of the entire album. Even if I had separately purchased the unwanted Opera excerpt the savings were substantial .
I wanted to add a Bruckner cycle to the music stored on my phone. I found several cycles on Amazon where the MP3 were being offered at 3 times the price of the CD version. What a deal.

Current Presto listing - UK prices.... all looks fair and logical now....

http://www.prestoclassical.co.uk/r/DG/4795059#download

Did you order this a while ago...?

[richardfinegold]

Current Presto listing - UK prices.... all looks fair and logical now....

http://www.prestoclassical.co.uk/r/DG/4795059#download

Did you order this a while ago...?

Yes, back when I wrote the post in January of 2016

[Sir Velo]

Yes, back when I wrote the post in January of 2016

I think you'll find you wrote it in October.

I usually find that purchasing individual tracks works out more expensive than the whole album, although if you only want say 50% of what's on offer, the individual tracks option may be marginally cheaper.

Still struggling to work out why download's are not significantly cheaper than physical media.

[Dave2002]

I'm still struggling to find out where we should put posts about downloads. I thought we had a thread for that, but maybe it's moved. This seems to be in the "wrong" section - "Talking about music" - shouldn't it be in "Record Review" or a similar area? Maybe there was one "What download are you listening to now" - but searching to find a thread is sometimes like looking for styli in cornfields!

[Nick Armstrong]

I'm still struggling to find out where we should put posts about downloads. I thought we had a thread for that, but maybe it's moved. This seems to be in the "wrong" section - "Talking about music" - shouldn't it be in "Record Review" or a similar area? Maybe there was one "What download are you listening to now" - but searching to find a thread is sometimes like looking for styli in cornfields!

Doesn't 'Advanced Search > search "download" in thread title' work?

Currently listening to most recent download, the Fray/Rouvrier Schubert 2- and 4-hand piano album "Fantasies" - the complete album was more expensive as a download than the CD, but selecting the 6 tracks I wanted (out of 7 I think) made it a couple of quid cheaper than the CD...

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

If you are looking to buy second hand, there's no contest.

[MrGongGong]

For me the "economics of downloading" are
for every one of my tracks downloaded I get £0.01

[Dave2002]

Doesn't 'Advanced Search > search "download" in thread title' work?

That approach gets you to here - http://www.for3.org/forums/search.php?searchid=4196679 or here - http://www.for3.org/forums/search.php?searchid=4196684

The way I tried originally gets to this current thread - which I think is really filed in the wrong place. There doesn't seem to be a proper "home" for downloads.

[Dave2002]

Has anyone else tried to login and download from Qobuz lately? I thought I might actually try the Stockhausen "Helicopter Quartet" after all - since it's ostensibly cheap at present - under £1, and I found an intriguing Gramophone review - https://www.gramophone.co.uk/review/...string-quartet - but Firefox now reports that logging into Qobuz is not secure. While this might be OK, the economics if things were to go belly up would be distinctly unfavourable, if one's accounts got hacked because an attacker managed to misuse a password either on the Qobuz site or elsewhere.

Has anyone else noticed this, and is it a matter for concern?

[cloughie]

Current Presto listing - UK prices.... all looks fair and logical now....

http://www.prestoclassical.co.uk/r/DG/4795059#download

Did you order this a while ago...?

No contest really why would you pay more for a download than the CD?

[Richard Barrett]

For me the "economics of downloading" are
for every one of my tracks downloaded I get £0.01

Did you make more than that from CDs? I didn't.

[MrGongGong]

Did you make more than that from CDs? I didn't.

I might have made more from ones I sold at gigs in the past
but it's certainly not a way to get rich

I did get enough PRS once to buy a bottle of Whisky

[Nick Armstrong]

If you are looking to buy second hand, there's no contest.