Quote Originally Posted by itkman View Post
It's also down to the fact that bands make a lot less through record sales these days. Gigs are now the main earners for a lot of bands.

I recently moved and got a lot of my old CDs out of storage as I didn't have room for them in my old house. Many of the older CDs (mid 90's to early 00's) had stickers on them with the price, around the £13.99 mark. I never pay more than a tenner for a CD these days, not sure what £13.99 is in today's money but I'd imagine it's around the £20 mark.

I'm not sure where the missing £4-5 used to go but you can be sure it's not the record companies taking the hit.
Bank of England's inflation calculator says £13.99 in 1991 is the equivalent of £27.56 in 2016 (it only goes to 2016 and thought I'd choose a quarter of a century).

You've got a point that I've thought of about cd prices. I wonder how manufacturing costs have changed in quarter of a century? Back in 1991, CDs were still a bit of a luxury as cassettes were still the most sold format. I remember buying my first personal CD player in 1992 and it cost me around £80, which was about the cheapest I could get at the time.

CDs were no more expensive to produce than tapes (I think they may have even been cheaper to make) but had a premium attached to them as they were clearly a far superior product. Rather than record companies taking a hit nowadays, I expect they milked the excesses they made from over-expensive CDs at the time. Some of those profits may have found the artists, but I bet it mainly went to the companies themselves. File sharing has probably had an effect on musicians' income too.