people have this stupid perceptin that a CD costs like £1 to make so it should be cheaper.

to go into making a full album u'r talking about actually signing the band, legal fee's, advances, recording time 9this doesnt come cheap even in shitty little studios so when ur hiring places like abbey road ur talking £1000s a day), promotion, producing the CD, artwork, distribution and a couple of other things that add onto the cost.

it gets very expensive very fast to make a pro quality album. it usually takes about 200'000 to half a million album sales to break even, if bands dont break even they get dropped plain and simple.

u lower the price of CDs and its going to jump up another couple of hundred thousand sales needed to break even, not alot of bands can shift that amount of records easilly and music as a result will suffer cos as uve stated, even lowering prices wouldnt stop people downloading for free so it would just mean higher sales targets for the bands with less chance of actually making them.