Poor RIAA....
Tell me again how file swappers like I was are the criminals?
Two years ago, a Federal Trade Commission inquiry prodded the recording industry to abandon a practice that authorities said was a not-so-subtle attempt at price fixing. In essence, the record labels were punishing the discounters by denying advertising subsidies to merchants who strayed below certain price levels.
That practice also led Eliot Spitzer, New York state attorney general, to file a lawsuit in August 2000 against the major labels and largest retail chains. Twenty-nine other states (California, a hub of the music industry, not among them) have joined the lawsuit, which has cited consumer damages of $480 million because of alleged price fixing. A spokeswoman in Spitzer's office said that a settlement will probably be announced this month.
When the CD arrived in the mid-1980s, many industry voices said that the new format would be cheaper to produce than LPs and tape cassettes (and, indeed, it costs about 40 cents to make a CD, and the packaging adds 25 cents to that) and that the savings would be passed on to retailers and consumers once the new format was phased in.
That, of course, never happened, and the industry had a historic windfall as fans replaced their vinyl collections.
That profit party was crashed, however, by a consumer revolt called digital download.
