Hello Bill, Sunday, December 1, 2002, you wrote: bnn> In places like Thailand, people make a living off illegal copies of bnn> music. Nothing you would find discussed on this list, but major label bnn> stuff. Again, the record business makes no allowances for what people bnn> can afford to pay. It is sad but true. Majors in Russia for example prefer to loose money than to do something to establish affordable prices. It used to be the same with movies and computer games, but slowly the situation changed. Now you can buy localized VHS tapes or computer games for very reasonable price. You can still find a cheaper pirated one, but in most cases customers would prefer the legal one, therefor the market of pirated copies in these businesses went down almost completely. Talking about the music, most Russian labels are making two different kinds of CDs: cheap ones printed in local plants with reduced low quality booklets and regular ones with digipacks extended fine pressed sleeves and so on. The customer can choose what to buy. I clearly understand that with international music it would be hard to prevent re-export of cheap CDs if they would be produced (it is not an issue with games and videos as they are translated into Russian and therefor not in a huge demand), but something like reduced priced releases should arrive in case the labels want to start making money on that market. In fact, several "For Russia Only" CDs were printed about five years ago. They were three times cheaper and were very popular. But this initiative ended almost immediately. bnn> In any case, the price of CDs was supposed to come down years bnn> ago. It never did. Now it will have to go up so that record bnn> companies can make up what they're losing on MP3 files. It is actually not true, that the record companies are losing money on MP3 files. Surveys say that people who are sharing music buy more CDs after all. It is both because they are becoming music addicts and because they are informed better. NP: Misha Mengelberg Quartett "Four In One" (CD) -- Best regards, Peter Gannushkin e-mail: shkin@shkin.com URL: http://www.downtownmusic.net/