music value – some metrics
i guess synthesis is what i do here, so here’s a quickie on the business of music…
with a nod to barry ritholtz, whom i’ve neglected for too many moons, and john buckman, whom i’ve pretty much neglected since i dropped some first impressions here… two statistics worth considering from very different sources, but mostly about that little thing we call the album.
CD prices drop slightly [barry ritholtz – big picture]The average retail price of full-length CDs fell to $13.29 in the first quarter of 2004
Magnatune summary for April 2004 [john buckman – magnatune]The average purchase price for Magnatune albums in April was $8.59
anyone want to guess which statistic is closer to “real market value”?
update 8:30am: barry responded to this in the ungodly hours of the morning, so i was inspired to go after another metric i knew i could put my fingers on quickly:
cd baby current numbers:
1,007,312 CDs sold online to customers.
$7,953,216.85 paid to artists.
that works out to $7.895 per cd, plus the $4-per-cd terms that cd baby works under, makes the average retail price of cds that move through cd baby $11.895. i do have to note that this is the average of all cd’s ever sold through cd baby, which is not a good comparison for the spot-prices of the other metrics in this post, so take it for what it’s worth…. maybe we can encourage cd baby and magnatune to publish monthly data (that seems like a reasonable sampling window) and see what’s hiding in there.