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Survey says.... music costs too much. At least according to a recent Ipsos study. Most respondents said that they refrain from downloading pirated music, but at the same time a bulk of respondents feel that the price of legal purchase are too high. This comes as mixed news for RIAA given their desire to raise online music prices. ArsTechnical delves into the subject and determines that the market for online sales has yet to reach its potential, and that the music industry walks a fine line between pricing power and quality of content.

For me this survey sums up various feelings that I've held about music for a long time. On the one hand I've always been a music fan, and I've purchased my fair share of albums. But on the other hand I haven't bought anything mainstream in the past 4-5 years. Yes I may be getting older, but more to the point I haven't deemed many CDs worthy of purchase lately. On my old site I briefly ran a music review section that categorized the latest releases either "Buy", "Burn", or "Don't Bother". The system was simple; I'd download an entire album and listen to it for a week or two. Then if I really liked the album I'd buy it, and if I didn't I'd crack the CD and chuck it in the garbage. Unfortunately I found that few commercial albums were really worthy of purchase, and I ended up trashing of a lot of CDs.

In recent years I've taken to simply previewing the albums via vendors that allow it, and only buying the tracks that I like. But still this isn't helping the music industry. Most of my purchases are for tracks from classic albums. The simple fact is that very little of what I listen to today is "New" music. From time to time I do listen to Internet radio, and occasionally I will hear a few new songs that I like. But it's still not enough for me to purchase the entire album.

The point of my personal listening habits is simple. I don't buy full albums now that I don't have too. The record industry needs to get off its high horse and either start stepping up the quality of albums, or move on to another distribution model. The former being more expensive than the later, I'd say the industry knows what it has to do. They just have to figure out a way to make it financially feasible. That will require cutting a lot of fat and middle management layers as well as overhead. It will require the industry to slim down, but as with any weight loss program it will inevitably benefit their health. Call it the MP3 Weight Loss Program.