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ERA hit out at one pound albums proposal

By | Published on Monday 18 October 2010

The Entertainment Retailers Association have hit out at former Warner boss Rob Dickins’ suggestion last week that a solution for the record industry’s digital woes would be to slash the price of a download album to a pound. As previously reported, Dickins proposed the radical rethink of pricing in the digital music market during a conversation with REM manager Bertis Downs at In The City last week.

In what some outside the record industry have called an enlightened proposal, Dickins said that the music business would never stop file-sharing through litigation or three-strikes style initiatives, and should instead look for business models that can compete with the illegal free music services. And that, he suggested, might require a radical revamp in pricing, based on the principle that if digital albums fell to a pound the industry would sell a lot more, boosting overall revenues.

But ERA, which represents both high street and digital music sellers, were not impressed by the proposal. They also criticised Dickins for making such suggestions now he’s outside the record industry, pointing out he ran Warner UK and, for a time, record label trade body the BPI during an era when the major record companies arguably kept CD prices artificially high.

Music Week quote ERA chairman Paul Quirk thus: “Rob Dickins is part of the generation of executives who benefited personally from the age of £14 CDs and gave the music business a bad name and so it is ironic to hear him espouse the cause of the £1 album. Basic arithmetic indicates that this is a non-starter”.



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