.....I wouldn't buy ten times as many.
However, I would certainly buy more than the nine or ten CDs (very low average for this web-site!) purchased in HMV in Oxford Street each year.
Also, the extra CDs that I would purchase would be back catalogue and not by new artists.

Sorry, I'm being flippant. It's true, though. I currently buy no CDs. I would buy them at a quid. And definitely a lot more new artists. Even 3 quid would do it for me, to be honest.

Like Ranger I suspect a lot would be back catalogue.

Wasn't this very subject discussed at length on an early podcast? Yes I would buy or download more for a quid or even two or three. At the moment it's just too easy to 'find' albums with a couple of mouse clicks, sometimes while you're still reading the review of them... Er, or so I've been told *shuffles off guiltily*.

my heart says I would. And I like getting a "free" backup, and a nice package with my music. Especially with classical and archival jazz; a good example is My Lady Rich, by Emily Van Evera:

http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2005/Apr05/My_Lady_Rich_A...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/earlymusicshow/pip/gyhid/

(which is surely a lot more than a quid's worth).

However I live in a small flat for more than 1/2 the month, and have now come to enjoy 320kbps Spotify, and Apple Lossless, and am already thinking of doing what so many of the Massive have done. In my case this will be putting the less interesting CDs away and just keeping the best packaged ones accessible. So the "pound who wants 'em" approach is too late for me.

I would definitely buy more, but I can’t see it happening. It still never fails to amaze me why downloads are the same or more expensive than cd’s!

and if new vinyl cost a fiver or less, I suspect the joists to our top floor would collapse within 12 months...

yesterday I was wandering round our local flea market. I had my headphones in and on came The National just as I was looking through a plastic crate of old Playstation games, cd's and most strikingly a large vibrator! Next to Anne Summer's finest was a copy of National's Alligator. I like The National have seen them a couple of times bought the odd album but probably wouldn't have bought this lp otherwise. It was just one of those every day coincidences so I bought it for a quid.
Having said this I have moved over to Spotify for most of my daily music listening.

A case in point: The other day I was down in London and went into HMV on Oxford Street. Had a look around and saw lots of stuff I was curious about - CDs I know are supposed to be brilliant but by artists whose music I've never heard, or know little of - but as they were all over £10, some over £15, I was reluctant to take the plunge. However, within ten minutes walk there are two branches of Fopp where, despite being owned by HMV, the same records are most likely £3 or £5. When I see the CDs for this price I'll happily take the plunge and almost always do.

No matter what they charge though there are those who will still refuse to pay - when I look at apps for my phone for example there are people who complain that an app costs even 50p. The craziest situation I've seen was a while ago when Nine Inch Nails released an (excellent) album for free on their website, and I told a couple of my colleagues who I knew were fans. Guess what? They both downloaded it from torrents.

As for me, even if CDs came down to the "standard" Fopp price of £5 I think I'd need to get an extension built on my house. Bring it on, I say.

not necessarily 10 times as many, but a lot more impulse buying on the strength of 1 good track, a positive mention here etc.

(hey we can say that now) a combination of expense plus too many duplicated tracks (I was buying largely old jazz and reggae). I was told how to "steal" (sic) the few non-duplicated tracks off the internet. Then I found that I was having more fun finding stuff that way. Cue a decade or so of "stealing".

Recently, with Amazon undercutting everyone combined with my finding a state-of-the-art CD player cheap, I have started buying CDs again. Lovely stuff such as Mingus and Monk can be gotten at 3 or 4 albums for less than a fiver. Things to play them on can be found inexpensively in boot sales and online. A friend found Sansui and Rotel amps in a boot sale "you can have them both for a fiver mate"!

Maybe in a few years time all that cheap hifi will have vanished into skips and landfills so fill yer boots people!

As I commented in the Nothing Comes For Free thread last night, I really think the guy is onto something. And £3 would be fine for me too.

And at a quid a go I'd buy catalogue-fillers and older stuff that I'd like to try. At the moment I'm doing this using Amazon Marketplace (Used CDs from £0.01 (plus P&P))
Would also buy more new stuff that I hadn't considered
However £1 does sound remarkably cheap - if pricing was lowered, I would consider £3-£5 to be a more reasonable price.

Buried In this weeks issue is an offer whereby you can get an album download from amazon for a quid....they don't even make a big deal of it ...

Buried In this weeks issue is an offer whereby you can get an album download from amazon for a quid....they don't even make a big deal of it ...

Buried In this weeks issue is an offer whereby you can get an album download from amazon for a quid....they don't even make a big deal of it ...

I have I think around 1500 CDs (which isn't many compared to some on this site) and the few I currently buy tend to around £3.99 and are usually back catalogue. I just don't have the space and there are plenty that I haven't played in years (not cos I don't want to, but because I just don't have time).

I don't think the Penguin books analogy is a good one - books were not at the time coming to the end of their "useful life" and there was no glut of them on the market (the reverse in fact).

There is a Fopp five minutes walk from my office in Glasgow. I buy lots of CDs there when they reach £3, sometimes £5. Recent picks include a great 3CD Rockabilly collection, the complete Ella Fitzgerald sings Duke Ellington and Rodgers&Hart, and a Mighty Diamonds compilation.

I also buy books at the bottom of the price range, including half a dozen Jeff Abbot books at £2 each, and Clinton Heylin's Babylon's Burning for £3.

I still enjoy buying CDs and books at that price.

I've run out of space for more CD towers, so I need to go through the collection and root out about 50 that I can survive without to make space. That'll be tonight's task.

In the very short term I'd probably go berserk and buy up several dozen CDs each month. Then I'd note the rapidly growing heap of CDs still to be listened to, and reluctantly throttle back to my current rate of about 6-8 CDs a month. Making them cheaper doesn't give me any more hours in a day to listen to them, alas.

but I wouldn't expect a current or former head of a music business to have a clue about how to go about selling music at this point. And that's what makes it so surprising that he has such a sensible idea! Look at phone apps: games typically range from $1 to $5, er, whatever that is in pounds, and I believe that the better games are more profitable than they used to be at $30 to $90.

That said I buy way too much music already so wouldn't increase the number of tracks I purchase. But we're all outliers here, eh?

I think a pound just sounds too cheap - no nee dot take what you buy sensibly. However, at £3-5 you end up at a similar price as a cup of coffee in your cafe of choice. At that point the CD becomes an easy implulse buy. The emusic discussion the other day picked this up as well. If music is cheaper you can buy more and do so with more freedom.

I plan trips to Covent Garden just for the thrill of getting a fistful of CDs for £30. It reminds me of the good old days of record buying, but I can only manage this every six weeks or so. There is just too much music to assimilate, between Fopp back catalogue splurges, eMusic monthly subscription, and the occasional chart CD. Then of course there are the several thousand shiny discs and all of the old vinyl gathering dust too.

If albums cost £1 I would undoubtedly buy tonnes (literally), I doubt I would ever find time to play them though.

I'm probably not the type of consumer that they are trying to coax, and I suspect that also applies for everybody else here.

I wouldn't buy many more because of space constraints and because I've got too many discs already that I've barely listened to.
It's a test I apply in Fopp. I see discs at £3, usually of back catalogue, and have to ask am I likely to play it more than once or twice.

That seems a ridiculous price to pay for all the work that musicians put into making an album. If I like a band I am prepared to pay a sensible amount (let's say £10) to hear their music. Why the hell shouldn't I have to pay? I don't expect to walk out of a bookshop with a hardback photography book for £1.

Back catalogue is a slightly different matter. I am happy to take advantage of cheap prices at Fopp.

At the moment I sample tracks on download. If I like them enough, I download a whole album. If I really like the album I may get round to buying the CD as a hard-disk back-up.

Most of my CDs got sent down to a box in the cellar a long time ago. They take up space on shelves which would be better occupied by books. Besides which, I suspect that the ship has sailed on this format - I mean, have you tried buying a CD player lately? I wanted to get one for my kids, but the big retail outlets aren't really interested in selling them any more.

Although I was just getting into the "I don't need to own it" idea, the temptation of a quid a CD would get me buying again. Easily.