i sometimes wonder how much of a notion the average listener has about cost. As a musician i can tell you in sheer production costs alone hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent on recording pop music. And that's the cheap end! And no matter what apple tells you about how great garage band is, you can't make a great sounding record at home. Every record that came from someone's home spent tens of hours in a really expensive studio to fix the sound quality and make it sound professional. If you spend 100,000 dollars on making a studio album you need to sell 20,000 copies at $5 a piece to break even on it. Which says nothing for promotion or distribution. I wonder if we could ever get to a point where people won't pay enough for music to make great sounding records?

Look at Jack White, who produces his own albums in his own analog studio. He eschews big advances on production. I remember reading that he made, and I can't remember which album, the follow up to the big break through, for less than $10K.

I track Soundscan figures every week, and whenever an artist is part of the iTunes free song of the week (where you have the option of downloading the entire album for $6) artists chart very high on the Digital Album Chart. Considering the elimination of the cost of a physical product, the profit on $6 is not a bad thing.

iTunes is a much healthier indicator of price point. Amazon is an exponentially growing competitor, but iTunes is the #1 music retailer in the US.