said by rds24a 
:There's two points of view on the whole $0.99 deal:
1. The parts cost more than the whole. Common practice...ever price out buying a car piece-by-piece from NAPA? Way more than the whole. However, It currently costs more to buy the whole online than a CD in the store.
2. The lack of distribution. No CD's, no shipping, etc. etc. There should be a price break for that, I agree. However, there is a premium on convenience and I'm not willing to argue that it should be $0.50 or $0.75 or $5.00 an album. I think $0.99 a song is OK...not great, but OK.
As for the file size/quality issue. I'm sure it's more a matter of Dances with Focus Groups trying to find some one file size that provides sufficient quality while reaching out to those lowly dialup users who still have to wait 20 minutes to download one 3 Mb song file. Perhaps the solution there is to offer a hi-fi and a not-so-hi-fi version, but I guarantee you there will be a price difference (for not much reason other than they can).
Good points you make. You should check out the price breakdown that Wired had in a recent article. Reading that makes the cost of 75 cents a track sound more appropriate.
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