I don't know anything about their business

Their business model combines losing huge amounts of money with paying a pittance to artists. So, in that sense, I'm in agreement with you.

...the trouble is that most of us don't think at all about the provenance of what we consume. It's just there, and any content that can be digitised is regarded by almost everyone below a certain age as being theirs by right, no money required.

My personal view is that I'd pay up to 8 quid for a CD, about 7 or 8 for a paperback and no more than a tenner for a DVD. I think iTunes films are far too expensive at a tenner, though: I reckon if they made them their standard £7.99, they'd do a lot more business. As for music streams, I've more or less given up on Spotify because there's too much choice, and I get more pleasure from actual ownership. I've given up on eMusic because there's not enough choice, on the other hand: half of what I search for, I can't find. If Spotify were like eMusic - a monthly subscription that gives you your music to own for good - I'd be more interested. If eMusic were more like Spotify - i.e. positioned slightly less left of the field - I'd be more interested there, too.

But even at 32, I'm a dinosaur. As I've said before, every single kid I've ever taught would regard my paying for music in any form as ludicrous, archaic and rather sweet, a bit like scrubbing the front step.

Dovetails together nicely with the trials and tribulations of HMV and the thread(s) here about mflow.com and their 20p per track offer over Xmas and the New Year.

To date I have mainly resisted downloads as I love the feel of the jewel case, the whole buying experience and, if you shop cleverly you can buy most music for no more, if not less, than the downloaded version.

But 20p a track? I went absolutely beserk. With the average 12 track album costing £2.40 who wouldn't? I wouldn't have bought anything like that much from itunes or Amazon. Do I care its's so cheap? Should I care?

You see a just released DVD for £18. Unless you want it so badly it hurts, you know that give it a couple of months it'll be in the three for a tenner racks. That's something we've now got used to seeing. And £18 is way too expensive for a DVD anyway.

Once upon a time I'd happily pay £15 for a CD because that's what they generally cost. But now I would seriously baulk at that. If a discount war had never happened, the market might be in ruder health.

I think Fopp have it about right. I will happily pay £5 for back-catalogue CDs, providing they've been sympathetically remastered and have a few goodies added. I will happily pay £10 for new CDs or a DVD. I don't buy downloads or streams, and have no intention of ever doing so.

Going into HMV recently and seeing them asking £13.99 for the same disc I can buy from Amazon for about £9 including postage has me snorting with derision. I can't afford to subsidise their retail outlets and staffing policy to that extent; it's too much per disc. I buy a lot of music, and though I understand the business pressures you mention, I can't help think that for my custom they simply didn't have the cost balance right.

I'll buy Free Range chickens at a premium from Sainsburys, in fact I'm lucky enough to be able to decide not to buy any other sort of chicken, but in the music market the same model doesn't work; I don't have a choice between a badly treated broiler Lindisfarne back catalogue CD and a fluffy Free Range version, it's the same product.

It's an unanswerable question I fear.

At the Massive Awards me and Backwards7 had a conversation on this topic because he had just spent £14 on a Swans CD in Fopp that day. I was taken aback that he had paid so much money in this day and age, and I remembered that I once paid £27 for a Fred Neil CD. This was around 15 years ago mind, and I still play it, so it was undeniably £27 well spent, but I'd never do that now. Why?

I suppose I valued music more when I was younger. So did my parents when they were young. When my parents stopped buying music themselves, my generation picked up where they left off. The generation below mine are not going to do that. Music is one of many entertainment options available to them, they think its free, so the only target market left is people like me who have residual guilt and pay for things.

Sadly I am buying less. My flat is quite small. Space is limited. Money is tight and rent is high. My bookshelves are full and I took nine bags of stuff I have read and stuff I no longer listen to to the charity shop before Christmas.

A solution? Paradoxically the only one I can suggest is buy less stuff. If you do that, you value what you do buy more. The less you buy, the more you use it, and the more likely you are to make considered and smart purchases in the future. If enough people shop like that, the economics may adjust for stores etc to survive.

Stuff is worth whatever people are prepared to pay for it. You also have to remember that us people here love and value our entertainment and, as a result, aren't particularly representative of the population at large.

As long as we're not actively stealing an artist's work, do we really have a responsibility to pay more just to sustain their career or the lifespan of the retailer we've bought it from? I don't mean to sound heartless, I wouldn't want anyone to go out of business, but if an outlet sells a commodity for a certain price, it's a calculated decision and we're well within our rights to take advantage of it.

Then you get deflation, which may seem like a bargain for a few years until the whole market packs up and leaves. It's a moot point in Japan right now: I have just been saying on the HMV thread how they recently quit Japan as there was no great revenue to be made despite their being popular. Didn't the same thing happen with Borders Books in the UK, with huge damage to the magazine/periodicals trade? I'm still undecided at the wisdom of online shopping undercutting, or cutting out, the high street. I am also a terrible fogey as I would rather own a hardcopy than a download, so would pay slightly more for my copy.

I just got an email from HMV advertising a sale with DVDs from £2.99 ...

Wild surmise: old stuff usually has very little value (although see below for literary exceptions), marginal stuff with no mass market appeal has little value as a one-off - but first-run, mass-market material in whatever medium (book, music, film, game) retains high value ... so Pirates of the Caribbean, Harry Potter, Jay-Z or Super Mario get investment and stagger on for yet another iteration while your man Rob Young may or may not get an advance to write another book ...

Question: will this eventually destroy diversity? In the way we've grown up with it, record companies sending cheques to Frank Zappa for example, probably yes. If the margins are squeezed right down because of digital distribution, then you need big sales to break even or emerge into profit. Although here's a daft analogy ...

More than three years ago, I got interested in the photo sharing website Flick and started posting up pics of Edinburgh & elsewhere in Scotland. I paid for a subscription ($25 a year or something, so pretty cheap, but allowing unlimited storage) and now have more than 600 pics on the site - other people have thousands. I make no claims for my snaps - they're a hobby rather than a business move - but what i've noticed is that mass lends interest. I now usually get 50-100 views a day, peaking up to 150 or 200 if i put up new images. In context, that's not a lot, but it keeps me happy enough.

Similarly, there are authors who toil through a few books somehow, keep them on the shelves at Waterstone's at full price (or at least among three-for-two offers), and build up a sufficient following that their new works are always sought out and subsequently make a living from combination of back catalogue and new releases. In a local Scottish context, I'm thinking of sci-fi writers like Charles Stross (stupidly prolific) or Ken MacLeod (almost a novel a year since the mid '90s) who are hardly household names, except in households with cuddly Cthulhus. So the model, perhaps, is not to expect corporate largesse or one big hit ... but to put in years' worth of very solid application, living on fresh air, until the average income creeps up to acceptable. An understanding partner with a proper job comes in *very useful* here ...

Spotify Premium users. Took the plunge recently after using the ad service for over a year. I've found it surprisingly easy to live without a physical product, much as I'm enjoying another recent purchase - a Kindle. I will very occasionally shell out a considerable sum for a really nice piece of stuff, the Beatles mono box for example. If the standard of CD packaging we've seen recently had been available sooner perhaps the industry would not have gone into meltdown. The fabs' 1987 releases were pretty shocking on that front weren't they (Pepper apart)? Crappy jewel case encasing an equally crappy stapled booklet.

Sorry, but £15 a piece for products like that was daylight robbery. As you sow, so shall you reap...

per book if you buy it for full price or £3 quid (or at least this is the case with most authors). It's the supply chain taking a loss from a notional official price which rarely if ever is charged.

I think DVD's are generally over priced but then I prefer to watch films at the cinema and haven't much time for all the tat like "free posters" "dvd extras" and the other clutter you get on multidisc film sets.

Also increasingly I value the use of a book or piece of music over the thing it's self. Having just moved home the huge boxes of cd's and read once thrillers just look like a waste of space. the fetish of the object I think is product of time when music was rare and hard to come by now that spotify or similar don't seem to be going away the need for hard copy "just in case " seems less and less important

If I had the right sort of phone and wasn't skint I think I'd pay for spotify to listen to stuff on the move as for now I listen to podcasts and tunes from cd's etc. I Rarely download music free or paid for.

My personal preference would be for licence fee for broadband use that was shared out to online producers ie iplayer, spotify, song writers, producers of little clips on you tube, coiners of funny quips on twitter, magazine websites in proportion to their popularity/track flow/click rate etc. this or similar sadly won't happen i imagine.

and the rise of the e-book, maybe the near-future will consist of digital downloads and shops like Fopp, who mix new music/video/books with lots of cheap stuff.

I'm also a Spotify Premium subscriber and jolly good it is too. I don't notice the £10 going out every month, but I now rely on Spotify much more than iTunes.

If we consider the minutes'-enjoyment-per-pound-spent ratio, surely books and albums should be the most expensive items - we play CDs we like over and over again, and most books take several hours (or 10-15 CD plays) to get through. Most DVDs, however, are destined to be watched only once or at most twice (2 or 3 hours' consumption), yet we often pay severalfold the price of a cinema ticket to acquire them. And a boxset of a full season of a TV show lasts only 13 hours, which is no more than a hefty novel, but it costs a hell of a lot more.

....what interests me is that people are prepared to devote the considerable time it needs to read a book like that but balk at paying the full price.

I mean, you read Twitter is worth 50 billion or something. But if I inherited it tomorrow where does my wages come from? I wake up, "Ah, I now own Twitter, all good..." then an electricity bill arrives. Then what? Twitter doesn't even have ads. Your King Of Palookaville.

nothing?

To some extent, the true cost of an item - raw materials, labour, distribution etc - becomes irrelevant when confronted by the stark market realities of how much we Joe Public really value it.

Apple enjoys huge margins on many of its products because we covet and value them, be it for utilitarian or aesthetic or both reasons.

Recorded music enjoys low margins because a) it is easily copied but fundamentally b) it's no longer the centrepiece of our leisure time. As CD has had to compete with DVD and games consoles, there's been an inevitable lowering in price and margins. Live music currently attracts reasonable margins because it's something we want to do but as the economic crisis kicks in and more acts look over-priced, this sector will also have to move.

Factor in new means of distribution and you have an industry that has moaned about the revenue side while doing precious little about the cost model. It's acts like Imogen Heap and other self-funding, self-selling internet users that are showing us the way forward.

It's rather like selling your house: it's not worth what you want for it or what the Estate Agent says, it's worth what someone is willing to pay for it.

Sonos seem to have shifted an enormous amount of units over Christmas. The net result being the overload of the Spotify and Napster servers with the result that neither are working very well. I've cancelled my Spotify subscription. Napster have said sorry to all customers and are giving them a free month.

I suspect that, once they've invested a few quid in some new kit and can provide a decent service, Sonos will provide a rich source of revenue for both companies.

I think that Ganglesprocket has a good point - buy less stuff and value it more. This is certainly the view that I am coming round to.

At 46, I am an uber-dinosaur (cf. Bob). I buy music (and books) in physical form - I think that I have only ever downloaded half a dozen times. I buy very little new, picking stuff up mostly at charity shops or car boot sales.

Because am only paying a pound or so for CDs, I often buy stuff I don't really want, but because I am curious or because I once had it on vinyl or just "because". If I am in a charity shop, there is the additional justification that I am making a donation. (The "post-two or three beers" browse on Amazon or ebay is also leads to unguarded purchases, when the "one-click" option becomes all to easy to use!)

Anyway, as a result of all this donating and "one-clicking", I have shelves and boxes full of CDs. Even though I take CDs back to charity shops (thus reinforcing the "feel good" factor in having bought them there in the first place - what could be better, charity, recycling and self-forgiveness all in one?), the number of CDs I have continues to grow.

I put the music onto my MP3 player and onto my hard drive, but I still think that that ultimate back-up is to have the disc too, so I have a tendency to keep stuff I really like or that would cost to replace - just in case the hard drive collapses or corrupts (or whatever these things do).

So here I am with all this music on my MP3 and even more on the laptop and the hard drive, with no time to listen to it. I only really get to listen to my MP3 player on my walk to work. My musical tastes and those of my wife do not coincide very much and then there is all the other time taken up with family life, which by-and-large does not require or allow musical accompaniment.

I have some CDs that I have bought but barely listened to. The current Word cover CD was put in the CD player once or twice over Xmas, but then I had to leave to room to do something or other, so I can't say that I have listened to it - except track 1 - Goldheart Assembly, which I did like (both times).

As a kid, I recall that we had about 10 LPs in the house - including Bridge Over Troubled Water, some of those Top of the Pops LPs, a "stereo" sampler and Charlie Rich - and we listened to them a lot. I still have a soft spot for S&G, 70's pop and The Most Beautiful Girl In The World. As young adult, I had LPs and cassettes that I listened to over and over again and knew inside out. Now, I have so much that I don't know what half of it is. I have to put my MP3 on shuffle to hear stuff I don't even know I have and I keep having to take the player out of my pocket to see what is playing and who it is by.

Maybe I need to lose my hoarding/completist mentality and go for "quality not quantity". What do you think?

PS. I am home from work today, in bed ill. As I was typing this, I was listening to some of the stuff on my laptop and came across this, which I remember first hearing when I was also home (from school) ill in bed. I still like it. (Sorry about the Steve Wright top-and-tail. The other version had Peter Powell and lousy sound.)

But I have an equivalent Rhapsody subscription for about $12 a month. I wirelessly stream the music to a Squeezebox connected to my hifi which also can get pick up music from my PC, podcasts and nearly every radio station in the world.

I buy no downloads and really have no need for regular CDs.

What's a fair deal to one is nothing of the sort to another.

I'm the one who was thrilled skinny by the offer of Electric Eden by Rob Young for £3. That's the price it was offered at. However it's a book I've wanted to read for a little while. It's list price of £17.99 is a lot of money though if push came to shove I was willing to pay that or the cheaper Amazon price (£10) if I couldn't find it to hand in the library. I hadn't.

In the meantime I saw it at a ridiculous price so I took it as anyone who wanted it would, of course. My post was not intended to trumpet how clever I had been at saving 15 quid at the expense of the retailer or the author. Far from it, it was to invite any and all who had a similar interest in the fine work to go and buy the thing to keep the retailer and author in some sort of operation. I would think that if anyone knew about it then all copies in stock would walk out of the shop at such a price. More people into Fopp and more with an interest in the work of Mr Young.

Despite what I actually paid for it I do think it 'worth' £17.99. I want to read it and even though nearly £20 for a book is a lot I can arrange my spending to afford it. I'm lucky. But, equally, others with similar interest would not countenance the extravagance for a multiplicity of reasons which they assign to their ideas of value. 'It's just a book', 'It'll be in the library soon enough', 'It's a risk - I may not enjoy it and don't want to feel I'd wasted money', etc.

I agree that we should all pay and I agree what we are asked to pay is affordable to the majority but value and worth will always be subjective.

It the case of Spotify they're no doubt trying to establish two business models - advertiser led and subscription led. It works for Sky.

In terms of Electric Eden it's probably because the shop and/or warehouse want to clear stock so they take a hit on individual ticket items hoping that volume sales will make up for it, assuming the wholesale price was cheap enough. It works for supermarkets.

When it comes to cheap clothing and food it's the retailers who call the shots. Somewhere down the line someone is taking the hit. And it's likely to be the farmer or some poor soul in Bangladesh making bugger all for a long working day.

I buy most of my CDs used and new from Amazon - sometimes they will be £0.01, which means my quality control has dropped. At that price it's cheaper to buy the Menswear album rather than get the two tracks that remind me of one night in 1995 than it is to buy them from iTunes.

I'm happy to pay full price for new CDs, but for anything back catalogue I will find the best deal using amazon used and new, and pay the least money possible - I think of it as a massive bargain bin, where the value of a product finds its natural level. Whereas 1p will buy the Menswear album (probably still overpriced), Revolver is still £7.

I feel that frequently I'm purchasing the illusion of having the leisure time to consume all these CDs, books and DVDs I purchase. the pile of unread books grows ever higher and I have unplayed CDs and DVDs yet I still add to them.

The internet has removed much of the thrill of the chase in that just about everything can be had for a price, so perhaps it's the thrill of finding something at a bargain price that remains.I was well pleased to finally get a CD copy of Gaels Blue by Michael Marra for under a tenner and replace my cassette copied from the library copy.Great album but usually goes for £30+ online ( or is it the same copy unsold at that price?)Some albums shine through and provide delight but I just feel I would enjoy more if I had the time to do so

However does anyone consider these issues when shopping at Poundland? I regularly buy my shampoo and toothpaste there (same brand too) without a thought for the impact on chemists and supermarkets.Likewise Mars Bars, Tunnocks Tea Cakes and milk.Why do we agonise when it comes to music and books?

Incidentally recent Poundland purchases included the Steve Marriott It's All Too Beautiful bio, The Bonzos' Pour L'amour Des Chiens and a patchy Sensational Alex Harvey Band DVD which was worth it for the promo clips.I enjoyed them all and the £1 price tag did them no harm whatsoever.

But I can afford £3. Thanks for the heads-up. It gives me the opportunity to be on an equal footing (culturally speaking) with those for whom £17.99 is not a significant chunk of the weekly food budget.

Of course, I won't know what the book is actually worth until after I've finished it.

I'm not sure about the ethics of paying £3 for a book.
After all, if that was the price stated you are hardly likely to give the person behind the till £10.

As with Pajb, above, I go the charity shop route and so £3 is actually more than I'd normally pay for a music book or novel.

But most of the music I listen to is actually 'free' from the various libraries run by Hackney council.
Right now I'm listening to Chuck Berry's first US album and a Jamaican mento collection from this source and I actually find that having them for just three weeks makes me really get into them.

if you wanted a recording deal, you went to the record company and maybe, just maybe, if they thought you might sell some records, you got a deal.

Today, you can get your work into the public eye through a variety of ways.

Whether you thought the old record companies were blockers, filters, censors or whatever, they effectively rationed what was available and in doing so kept the prices fairly high. By making it easier to release your record, book, film, whatever we've also fed the old supply and demand equation: with so much supply, price has fallen.

latest paperback The Good Man Jesus And The Scoundrel Christ. It cost £10.99, but I got it as part of a '3 for 2' offer from Waterstones (the only time I buy books in bookshops). It's got large font, lots of blank pages and I read it in under four hours. I'd say it was worth £1.99 and at that price I'd say give it a go. At £10.99 (and even discounted) I'd say avoid it as the publisher is taking the piss.

Books
'Destroy All Movies' - 17.99, about 3 quid below list -17.99,
6 novels from Amazon, at about 33% of each - 30.00
10 charity shop 10.00
900 free novels for kindle, bootleg download - Free

(in My defence, I bought the Kindle on the promise that the country I live in supplies kindle content. It does, but not a single publisher has bothered to make anything available. so fuck 'em)

DVDS etc
2 box sets - 50 quid
6 films on bootleg download - Free

Music

2 CDs at full price- (Sugarpie DeSanto and 'The Best Of Burlesque' -20.00
6 CDS from a pound shop - 6.00
5 Charity shop - 8.00
about 20 bootleg downloads -free

So, my dodgy argument goes, even though I pirated a lot of stuff, i spent about 200 quid on media. A bit more than usual, but it's usually at least a 100 quid a month. Much ore than most people spend I reckon.

On the other hand, most blokes I know of my age wouldn't have pirated anything this month. But they wouldn't have spent any money either, cause their no longer interested in books or records.
Thoughts?

When I was a kid, before the age of heavily discounted book selling, I spent all my birthday money on a hardcover copy of Carl Sagan's Cosmos. The book blew my mind and I still love it. I think that, at least in part, I treasured it because I'd made a big financial commitment and I'd been repaid by the book.

I'll take advantage of a freebee/ use a library/ Amazon discount like anyone else - but I find seeing wonderful things (like Young's book) piled high and cheap quite dispiriting somehow.

Like DH I'm a paid-up-and-deliriously-happy Spotify subscriber but I have this nagging feeling that it can't possibly last. It's like Christmas every day - yesterday it was hours of Philip Glass, the day before it was album after album of Miles Davis, today Florence and the Machine (I wanted to understand why The Word gets so aerated about her) and tomorrow, who knows? The new Streets album, if it's available.

I haven't bought a CD or a download for weeks and weeks and I have no desire to own the music when I can just listen to it anytime I want.

And yet. . . I feel uneasy that it's totally ridiculous to get all this for £4.99 a month. Uneasy to the extent that I'm now planning on a gesture purchase at least once a month.

Nope, I'm not stinking rich but it just seems the civilised thing to do.

Three quick points. I got Electric Eden for christmas (I suspect the giver got it for nine quid off Amazon, the current price). It's already on its fourth edition, so must be selling well.

I'm also an author, of numerous novels, and I get the same royalties on Amazon sales as I do on bookshop ones for most of them, because the only remaining big bookshops screw exactly the same ridiculous discounts out of publishers as Amazon do, sometimes more. If publishers sell a book at a discount of over 50% of the cover price (frequently, these days, they sell them at 45%, which is where Amazon makes its narrow margin) everyone gets less.

I use free Spotify once or twice a week to try out a particular track or artis. Over Christmas, I had a night with a Premium user who used it to DJ for the whole evening, even when playing songs that were in his cd collection. I began to insist on the lossless versions when he had them. The change in sound quality was so great that everyone in the room was convinced - even on an average hi-fi, you get much more pleasure out of lossless music. So there is a reason to keep buying full cds, even though my house is overflowing with them.

Try this for size: I gather you want to treat fairly, huge multinational giants who hire and fire staff without a second thought, whilst shareholders and directors make vast sums of money, often including bonuses for achieving targets they didn't actually get anywhere near? And if we can agree what a fair price is, who will benefit? Will they say a huge thank you to us people for keeping open the stores where they would continue to make money and hire and fire willy-nilly?? (and how do you think willy feels about it?)

You may think I'm sitting on the fence here..... but I suspect you won't. If people are selling stuff at the cheap it's because it suits them: and their long term decisions re stores and anything else will never be made for OUR benefit.

Unfortunately fair is a moveable feast . . . did Robbie Williams turn down the Take That $3 million gig and say : 'no it's not fair, that's too much money I couldn't Take That'..... no pun intended.... well a bit....

... of stuff being too cheap. I'll see a bargain-priced DVD boxset of something I'm interested in, snap it up - and then struggle to find the time to actually watch the thing. For example, I bought the boxset of the complete Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes films, in the wake of seeing the Robert Downey Jr. film last Christmas...

RRP: £50
Price I paid: £13.99

So far, I've only watched 'The Hound of the Baskervilles'. But I feel sure that if I'd bought that set at nearer to full price, I'd have made sure I set aside the time and worked my way through the set, and any associated extras. Whenever I bought boxsets in the earlier years of DVD - when they were relatively expensive - I'd damn well make sure I got my money's worth, and watched everything. But because it was so cheap, I don't really have that nagging feeling that I've shelled out for an attractive set of shiny coasters.

But no longer will pay any more than £6 for an album and usually considerably less. I don't buy new releases. There's so much old music to buy into and a new release will be old (and cheaper) in three months time. For example, Percy Plant's latest is only £5 on Amazon.

Historically, though, the mass market in recorded music only really started in the 1950s/1960s. Before that musicians earned their crust from performances. People working in other fields don't generally expect to be paid again and again for something they did four years ago. An artist can only sell a painting once. A car manufacturer only gets paid when the car leaves the showroom for the first time.

It's a tough call. We all want the musicians we like to be able to continue to produce it. But very few of us are going to pay more than we have to.

This is a long posting with various points well argued. I don't recall seeing the words "supply & demand".

I put a lot of items in my Amazon basket then move them to my Saved Items - To Buy Later section. I use this list as a reminder for future purchases. Every time I log on I nip into my basket area and there is usually a notice of items increasing/decreasing in price, sometimes by a few pence, sometimes by ridiculous amounts (99p CD back up to £5.99 just as I was about to buy it). It is interesting to review my pre-Christmas purchases and see how much prices have shot up - way more than the VAT rise.

Traditionally items get marked down when a retailer wants to get rid of old stock to make way for new. We are all aware now that most items in sales are stock items brought in especially for that sale i.e not previously stocked in most stores. Some items are produced specifically for the sales. I'm sure if you compare a Michael Jackson's Greatest Hits CD in HMV for £3 to one bought at £10+ you will find cheaper quality packaging, printing, etc. It's the way of the world. Possibly the same with books; a job lot of cheap paper used to produce a cheap version of a book in a printers undercutting other printers to cover overheads. It's how the capitalist system works.

moaning about how cheap something is, they are just grateful I guess to be able to afford something that would normally be out of their reach.

...is my one indulgence. I can't really afford it, but it enables me to synchronise pretty much anything to my iPhone and listen to it offline. Which makes it like owning music ripped to an iPod. With the distinct advantage: it doesn't take up any space. This has freed up my open-mindedness about new music no end. In the old days, if someone said "You must hear this" my reaction tended to be a weary "Really? Do I have to? Oh, you've done me a CD. How kind. More stuff to clog up my shelves..." Terrible, I know. But it's the truth. Now, thanks to Spotify, I actually and willingly take people up on their recommendations. If I don't like it, I dump it. If I do, I may buy it. Sometimes as a download (Eliza Doolittle), sometimes as actual physical product (The Posies). This suits me down to the ground. I don't need any more stuff, no matter how good or cheap it is.

*

stage, just no more room and I could do with having another clear-out. As other posters have said, we need to treasure more of the stuff we already have and certainly applies to me. Have come across a load of old stuff that I had forgotten about and will get back to.Generally, I am more relaxed about paying a little bit more for books, tend to make a judgement on whether am going to re-read, how it's been produced and also likely price of paperback version. Have found that price of paperbacks tends to be a bit of a ripoff, the dear old Penguin classics in the old days were never more than a couple of quid and last forever. I tend to put a ceiling of £10 on cds and around this for dvds.

This is something I've been thinking about a lot in recent months. With online streaming and rock-bottom prices for CDs, there now seems so little incentive to pay a decent price for music that I really wonder how artists are going to be able to continue to make a full-time living in future.

I agree that easier access to music makes it easier for artist to be discovered by fans who may then buy product or come to gigs, and we shouldn't repeat the mistake of the 'home taping is killing music' scare of the 80s. But this is on a whole other scale - what possible incentive does a young music tech-savvy fan have to pay £10 for an album they want when they can a) listen to it for free with a practically non-existent payment to the artist on Spotify, b) download the album for a maximum of £8 of which the artist gets very little c) illegally download the album in a few clicks or d) wait a few months and buy the album for £5 or less from a major retailer, from which the artist might be lucky to make a quid.

I'm kicking myself because I'm sure I read recently that Spotify itself has said their research showed 10% of their users bought more music as a result of it, but 20% bought less, but now I can't find the link.

I love online streaming and finding CDs bargains more than most, but, as I can afford it, I do feel that I have a duty to try to make sure a bit more of my money reaches the artists that so entertain me than necessity dictates. The solution I've reached is this: I tend to listen to streaming sites (We7 if possible as it pays better royalties than Spotify) and CDs in more-or-less equal amounts. I then make sure I buy one CD a month. Like most of you, I have more CDs than I can shake a stick at already, so I find that is enough to make sure I actually give them due attention. Crucially, I alternate my monthly purchases between bargains (£5 or less for a single CD) and 'full-price' CDs (£6-12). The latter I try to buy directly from the artist, either from their websites or at gigs to ensure they get the maximum return on them. I also try to make sure that I don't just buy CDs by artists who aren't available for online streaming, however tempting it is!

Although only a relatively small step (maybe £30 a year more than I would previously have spent), I appreciate this is a bit of a luxury and one I can only do as I earn a reasonable wage - I had no qualms about copying a load of CDs for a friend who works in a pub and struggles to pay her rent every month.

As for books and DVDs, I purchase them so rarely, I've not really considered whether they are getting a fair deal out of me. Can you often buy books and DVDs direct from artists websites like you can CDs?

Chris

A trip to Fopp in Covent Garden last night netted the following CDs
Broken Bells @£5
Them Crooked Vultures @£6
Kirsty MacColl Tropical Brainstorm @£3
Kerrang! The album 09 @£2 with any purchase

And I returned from a trip to Sainsbury this lunchtime with
Bruce Springsteen The Collection 1973-84 @£12.99

A total of £28.99 for 11 albums (two of them doubles) averaging out at £2.64 a pop. 154 tracks at less than £0.19 each. How much will the artists see from that? No idea. Am I pleased with my bargains? You bet.

compilation is another case in point. There was a big pile of them by the till in Fopp at £2 each and I'm pretty sure they're in the HMV sale for £3. This is a compilation that was released probably a year and a half ago now being sold as a loss leader. I'd have thought that a typical Kerrang! reader would probably not be likely to buy CDs any more.

I recently bought the complete Sherlock Holmes box set, starring the late Jeremy Brett; I was only about 8 when the series first aired, and I vaguely recall watching it with my parents. There are 41 episodes in the box set, which equates to about 73 p per episode. When I think of the pleasure the series has given me, I would've paid much, much more: it's one of the best TV shows I've ever seen.

On the same day I bought it, desperate as I was to find a Christmas gift for a good friend on the eve of the big day, I ended up paying £15 for Rubber Soul. I felt beads of sweat and guilt dancing down my back, as even such a great album feels terribly overpriced at £15.