According to a rolling stone article, Tom Petty Is Pissed, and rightly so. Coming on the heals of an interesting slashdot discussion on cd protection, I think this bears a little discussion.
My uncle doesn't agree that if you reduced the cost of CDs, you'd reduce the piracy. I say maybe yes, maybe no. You might not reduce the piracy, but you'd turn more profit from CDs I think. Right now I'm working for myself, doing the contract programming gig... money is tight. The decision on whether to buy (for example) the new Elvis CD (the 30 #1 hits one) would be a lot easier if the price wasn't over $20 (Canadian). See, if it cost, $3.00, or even $6, that's almost pocket change, and combined with what you can find in the couch, it's affordable. But with CD prices what they are, going in and buying more than two or three CDs is going to be a major purchase. When I filled in my collection of U2 CDs a while back I paid over $100 before I walked out of the store!
Anyway, I think that the opportunity to have consumers do impulse purchases would dramatically go up if CD costs went down. Then it would be worth it to them to just grab a CD instead of downloading from Kazaa or whatever. Of course, this leaves out the issue of buying a 12 track CD with two songs on it you want to hear, and the rest "filler" :)
Erhmm... anyway, Tom's got some good stuff to say about this, how he won't charge over $65 for a ticket to a concert (when he's being told he could charge $150), radio, and lots of other stuff. Kudos to Tig for pointing it all out.