Today I did the proper thing and purchased a copy of Scotty McCreery's debut album "Clear As Day" to put on my MP3 player. I chose to download it from Amazon MP3 and I was surprised to see they lowered the price even lower than it had been just a day or two ago so today it cost me a whopping $8.99 to download. It just took a few clicks of the mouse and the music was downloaded to my PC and then I could transfer it to my MP3 player (not an iPod!) That sure beat driving over to the local Wal-Mart or Target to purchase a real CD where I would need to deal with traffic, parking, unruly customers, and paying tax. But that made me think that I just purchased 12 songs and 40 minutes of entertainment for less than the price of three gallons of gasoline. Music has become such an inexpensive form of entertainment people compared to when I was young. I remember albums actually costing more than my piddly $8.99 decades ago when I was a kid, so I thought I had to find some hard data on how much music cost in the past compared to now. I found this good article which has a pretty graph, which of course what I needed on this numbers related blog! That sounded right since I remember spending about $15 to buy my brothers and friends albums for their birthdays and that was a lot of money for a young kid back in the 1970's and 1980's! I also remember purchasing our first CD player in 1985 and purchasing Whitney Houston's first CD for about $20. Why is it that our youth are not willing to spend half that to purchase a music download of their favorite artist? Is it really better to go to file sharing sites and spend countless hours downloading music illegally for free and not supporting your favorite artists? All to save a few measly bucks that would barely pay for their lunch at school.
My next goal was to find some historical gasoline prices and I found those easily enough, with a lovely graph on this site. So while music prices have actually fallen since when I was a child, gasoline prices have increased substantially. From 1979 through the 1980's gasoline stayed below $1.50 a gallon and was about $1.25 in St. Louis in 1985, so to pay for my first Whitney Houston CD (yes, I'll admit I purchased it!) it cost me over 15 gallons of gasoline, or a full tank of our Toyota Camry back then. My Scotty McCreery purchase today would not even cover three gallons of gas so that is a 5 fold difference if you consider the album to gasoline ratio.
People today have to realize how inexpensive music is to purchase these day and just buy it!
As for Scotty's album, "Clear As Say", it has been #1 on iTunes all day long and #3 at Amazon. I am guessing tomorrow's sales preliminary predictions will put it somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000, but you never know. HitsDailyDouble is putting J. Cole at 217K for this week with Blink-182 at 155K and Adele at 117K so depending how much their numbers fall for next week they may still be battling Scotty for #1 on the BillBoard overall chart next week (Adele's numbers are incredibly stable.) However he should safely land at #1 on the Country chart unless the Hank Williams Sr album does really, really well.