Journal: I feel dirty...

Yesterday, I broke two vows that I had held for a significant length of time. I feel a little dirty about it, so I'm going to air out my soul.

The first vow that I broke was to never buy a CD until the DMCA is repealed and CD's come down in price. Actually, I broke this one twice.

The second vow was to never, ever, EVER, buy a Cannibal Corpse CD. Ever. If you must know why, visit www.cannibalcorpse.net and read the lyrics. Actually, on second thought, don't. I'm serious.

The two albums I bought were Nile's "In Their Darkened Tombs" and Cannibal Corpse's "Gore Obsessed." Both of the CD's are quite excellent, but this journal entry isn't intended to be a review.

The total, for two CD's by decidedly NOT mainstream artists, was $39.94. That's US dollars, btw. For those that don't want to do the math, that's $19.97 apiece. For simplicity's sake, I'll round up to 20 bucks.

Perhaps I'm a bit old-fashioned, but I remember when 20 bucks got you a DOUBLE album by a top-selling band. I could understand charging, say, $16 for a really popular artist; 20 bucks for a fairly underground band is utterly unreasonable. $14 would have been far more reasonable, especially considering that Cannibal Corpse doesn't exactly have a ton of selling power. I can't understand how record labels and music stores can expect people to buy their stuff when they jack up the prices to outrageous levels. You can always hear someone blaming file sharing and piracy for the increases in price, but for Christ's sake, not three years ago CD's were somewhat more reasonably priced. Nothing short of nuclear war could cut into the record industry's profits so much in three years that they have to raise prices by 4 or 5 bucks.

It just pisses me off. I suppose that $40 I dropped for those two CD's should more than make up for the amount of mp3's I'm going to be downloading for the next while. Maybe I'll buy one or two more really stellar albums, but only if it's an artist I REALLY like. Otherwise, this is just ridiculous.