Less expensive recordable CD players are just now hitting the market, but consumer excitement over recording to the digital purity of a compact disc might be tempered by the cost of blank discs - currently selling for around US$6 in stores.
Initial high prices have become expected for first-generation consumer products, when big R&D bucks are being amortized across relatively few sales. But this is a different beast altogether. The same blank discs sold for professional versions of the recorders - and for PC-based CD-R drives - are available for as little as $2 to $3 apiece.
In part, the higher cost of the consumer discs is a reflection of one of the first potentially widespread applications of the 1992 Audio Home Recording Act.
The act mandates a royalty payment by disc manufacturers for each blank consumer disc sold, a compromise meant to resolve the interests of the recording industry as defended by the Recording Industry Association of America, consumer interests as lobbied for by the Home Recording Rights Coalition) and electronics companies, as home recording arrives in the pristine digital age.
There is, of course, a rationale for the royalties. The industry doesn't want to be ripped off by what it sees as a potentially large group of consumers with recordable disc players who record copyrighted music without paying the artists and recording companies their due. Discs for professional recording and PC drives are excluded from the royalty since such uses are considered to be less apt to result in piracy.
"We've been debating this issue for years with the consumer electronics industry," said Cary Sherman, general counsel of the Recording Industry Association of America. "Ultimately we adopted a royalty on recording devices and media which goes into a pool distributed to artists and record companies."
The specially-encoded consumer discs are thus the only CD-R media that can be used with consumer CD recorders. The CD recorder, selling for as little as $650, verifies that the disc is the correct type by looking for its digitally encoded ID flag, which is also used to prevent further copies being made from the disc after it's used to record copyrighted content.
Crafty owners of the new inexpensive recorders have already devised a home-brewed work-around allowing them to substitute the cheaper professional discs for those made for the consumer machines. By letting the machine read a properly tagged disc then forcing the door open and swapping discs, some have fooled their CD players, although they risk permanently damaging the new players.
That's just the kind of behavior that's bound to irk the recording industry. Sherman argues that the whole royalty debate is really about respecting the industry's role. Since "the amount of royalties being collected is such a fraction of what [recording companies lose in lieu of a CD sale], it's more a matter of principle than it is of economic benefit," he said.
"Do the math," Sherman added - arguing that a 3 percent royalty does not result in a major increase in the retail cost of the discs. Disc pricing, he said is an issue determined, and best addressed, by manufacturers.
But Philips Electronics, which sells the blank discs as well as its recorder, said disc prices are determined by two things: current market demand, now in an extremely nascent state, and the royalty paid to the recording industry.
Though discs may be priced at a premium initially, a Philips spokesman said, "as more of these things get out there, the price will go down." In fact, it already has, he pointed out. Another company, Pioneer Electronics, apparently has been selling more expensive CD recorders for several years, with disc prices as high as $14 each. The trend is expected to continue, sending prices below $6 before long.
Such factors may not explain the price gulf between the consumer discs and those for professional CD recorders and computers, but Philips could offer no further explanation.
Michael Blackstock, who posted to a newsgroup about his purchase of one of the players, is frustrated by the prices and questions the logic of the plan to protect copyrighted music.
"I know about the Audio Home Recording Act, but I bought my recorder to make recordings of my own music," he said via email. "If I wanted to copy music CDs, I would just turn on my PC and do it at two times the speed. No hassle at all."
