Submitted by cosmuk on Wed, 09/30/2009 - 17:09
HDtracks feels they have no option other than to raise their rates to $18.00 per Hi-rez album download.
David Chesky
"the last thing that we wanted to do was raise the price of our high-resolution content. But we made the difficult decision to augment our prices"
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http://www.accessyourlifestyle.com/
Amarra Model 4 / DroboPro-iScsi / Touch panel enabled iMac / Rowland Capri / BEL 1001/ Audio Physic Virgo III / REL Stadium III
Bummer. They say they are doing it to attract more publishers with high-rez content and, if it works, I guess it's a fair tradeoff.
I'm interested to see who they are able to bring on board. They're off to a great start, at least for classical, with selections from RR, Chandos, Harmonia Mundi, etc.
16/44.1 and 24/96 music files via iTunes running on a G4 Mac -> Wavelength Audio Proton USB DAC -> AKG K-702 headphones.
It's good to see that their increase is only $2 over their previous pricing for hi-def and only $6 over their pricing for CD resolution. I fail to understand how hi-def download vendors can justify nearly doubling the price of CD resolution downloads for their hi-def versions. The additional costs for storage and distribution for the larger files are quite small. Sure, the quality of the hi-def versions is better, but the number of customers who have the equipment to render hi-def content and appreciate that level of resolution (the market) is quite small.