The Market'll Straighten This Out But Good (Score 1, Interesting)

Though I think the music industry is acting in an exploitative and short-sighted way, I'm not terribly worried. The general consensus from the tech crowd seems to be that $3 a song is gouging. Supposing Apple caves and lets labels price their songs higher, consumers will reject price gouging and go back to piracy. After all, the labels aren't just competing with each other, they're competing with illegal P2P. Consumers have shown that they'll pay $1 for a song legally, but my guess is that if $3 is too much, the labels'll know it pretty quickly through lost revenue and prices will drop again. To play devil's advocate, though, consumers may actually be willing to pay more $ for certain songs. All songs, after all, aren't created equal, and I'd rather pay $5 for one good song than $1 for 20 bad ones. In any case, I'm guessing prices will be exactly where they should be in several years.