WORLD
Album price ‘should drop to £1’
Baku, October 15 (AZERTAC). The price of music albums should be slashed to around £1, a former major record label boss has suggested, according to BBC News.
Rob Dickins, who ran Warner Music in the UK for 15 years, said “radically” lowering prices would help beat piracy and lead to an exponential sales rise.
Mr Dickins was in charge of the label from 1983-98, working with acts like Madonna, REM and Simply Red.
But his “revolution” in album prices has been met with scepticism from many in the music business.
Speaking at the In The City music conference in Manchester, Mr Dickins said album prices had already been pushed down by price wars and declining demand, and were likely to fall further.
“What we need is a revolution. What we`ve got is an erosion. When I was running Warners, a chart CD could be £12.99. A chart CD now can be £6.99, maybe even £5.99.”
Some major album downloads currently sell for as little as £3.99 through retailers such as Amazon.
If record labels made the decision to charge much less, fans would not think twice about buying an album on impulse and the resulting sales boost would make up for the price drop, he predicted.