Today (and apparently only today) Amazon.com is selling Bob Dylan’s album Together Through Life in mp3 format for the price of $3.99. With ten tracks, that makes it 39 cents per track. (Except I guess you have to buy them all to get that price.)

It strikes me that 39 cents a track is about the right price for an mp3 file, and $3.99 about right for what would be a single-disc album. Normally, of-course, Amazon and other online music retailers charge about 99 cents per track. This is effectively the same price you’d pay for the actual CD. But when you buy the CD, you’re getting (a) the music in full resolution and (b) the packaging and artwork that you can hold in your hand — along with a disc that will last for decades if you take care of it.

As for the music’s resolution: many say that no one can tell the difference between a 320 kbps mp3 file versus what you would hear on the CD. Nevertheless, there is a difference in the nature of the product, and those selling it are aware of it; yet they are not figuring it into the price-point for that product. It’s a little bit like a furniture-maker selling a dresser made out of plywood but stained to look like cherry at the same price as a dresser made from real cherry, because, well, it looks the same.

And further to the point, Amazon does not offer 320 kbps mp3s; they currently encode them at a maximum of 256 kbps. I don’t use iTunes, but I’m sure that what they’re offering is roughly equivalent.

It has seemed to me for a long time that online music retailers ought to offer customers at least the option of downloading their music in a lossless format, like flac. People who don’t care about the resolution issues wouldn’t bother downloading those, because they would take so much longer and not be usable in the same way on an iPod, but those that do care could at least know that for the price they’re paying they’re getting the full monty, so to speak.

However, what I really think would be a shot in the arm for online music sales would be if they simply ceased applying the same pricing model to downloadable digital files as was (and is) applied to real CDs. Sell all online music files at about 39 cents, and all single CD albums at about $3.99. Record companies ought to be going through their vaults and archives and making absolutely everything available online. The selling points for online music ought to be (1) you can get anything of which you can conceive, easily and quickly and (2) it’s cheap!

I think that at a price-point like that, many who download music illicitly would come around again to paying for it, for the sake of ease of access, providing support to the artists and of-course avoiding illegality. But what do I know?

I suppose brick and mortar retailers would be upset if online music were sold so much more cheaply than actual CDs, but, heck, the world has changed. The music industry needs to catch up.

I know that I’m not saying anything that others haven’t said before, but seeing Together Through Life on sale for $3.99 today just brought this all front and center in my mind. So, just two more cents worth from another lover of music who fully expects to be ignored.

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