Should the cost of a CD be dependent on its production cost?

if they print 500,000 copies of the former example, the per cd cost is only etc etc

Yeah I see, but I don't know if that's really what I meant. I'm thinking more along the lines of the difference between a cheap suit and an expensive one, regardless of how many are produced...

aren't manufacturing/distribution and markup part of the suit world also?

I'm not sure what your point is/

no i dont think they should be priced that way but its just how it is. the cd that cost bugger all to make may be hugely better musically than the pricey one done via recording industry backing but thats kind of too bad really cause the industry has it all sewn up.
and what band, given the choice, would opt for using a 4 track when they could go for broke on a studios gear??
besides, we keep paying for them at the store price ( since none of us download off the net illegally of course ) so what are ya gonna do?

It seems I haven't explained my point well at all.. oh well.

hahaha no sorry.

No, I think I follow you perfectly, Jim. And it's a perfectly reasonable point.

I think the thing is that the market sort of takes care of that itself, which keeps people from worrying about it: in the broadest sense, an album that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars has the potential to make more money for the artist than one that didn't. Obviously I say that in the broadest possible sense, and there are plenty and plenty of counter-examples and anomalies. But what I basically mean is this: if the listeners suddenly started buying mostly cheaply produced and lo-fi records (and by some weird freak of logic major labels couldn't find a way to pour loads of money into creating "better" lo-fi records), then yeah, the people doing the suddenly-underground flashy expensive pop would start to need more money out of each sale.

In other words, it goes like this: labels spend loads of money making the records most people will be listening to, because they want them to sound really good and be competitive with other good-sounding albums. If you want to make a record and not spend all that time and money making it sound like that, well, you're probably going to sell less records.

NB at the start of the second paragraph where I say "an album that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars" I mean "an album that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to make," not one that has that as, like, the sticker price.

isnt it like this sort of already, i mean the cd's by big names that are recorded in montserrat and whatnot cost like 18 dollars and the indie records that are more cheaply made you get for like 10 dollars

But Ron, even when that's the case it's not really related to the cost of producing the album. The ten-dollar record gets hand-mailed from some kid's kitchen; the extra six to eight bucks on the multiplatinum Madonna CD is paying for the planes that ship it and the fancy stand-up display it goes in and the lavish marketing push that reminds you to go buy it.

Anyway on the shelves at Best Buy or Sam Goody they'd both cost the same, and the pop record would probably have a thick well-designed four-color fold-out sleeve to boot.

The only reasonable price policy is to make good albums more expensive than bad ones.

I thought you ment Studio Production costs- Think of what we would have to pay for a copy of "Loveless"

Loveless was sort of an sinkhole/undertaking on its own terms, but I seriously doubt it cost anything like what the average pop-diva record costs.

By the way, the suit analogy is sort of mind-bending! It doesn't work insofar as the average good suit really does have finer per-unit materials in it than a cheap one (better fabric, etc.), whereas CDs are flat-rate -- except for the sleeves and packaging and stuff. But it works better if you start thinking about name-brand clothes that's materially similar to store-brand clothes -- i.e., you pay more for the cut or brand, the design of the product rather than its material value. But then that doesn't work because good design is like good songwriting -- i.e., it doesn't necessarily cost money to the producer.

(But then even that's weird because plenty of the money spent on flashy pop records is paid precisely to hire well-paid high-profile songwriters and producers and engineers and mixers whose work is ostensibly "better" than everyone else's.)