Hm, unfair to whom. Do you know how much the artists actually receive?
There are clauses from the days of shipping vinyl to record stores, regarding breakage of disks. The label keeps a percentage (5% - 10% can't remember correctly), for broken disks. They still use these clauses decades after they have <edit>lost</edit> any basis in reality.
The Police financed the recordings themselves, to get higher royalty percentages.
Have you read about majors suing artists for damages after their albums flopped?
An economically optimal price is one that maximizes total profit.
If it's too high, fewer people will buy the product, which might reduce profit. If it's too low, the profit margin will be small in spite of lots of units sold.
It's subjective, but that doesn't make it nonexistent. I pay $10/mo. for Spotify. I'm happy with that. I think I get great value for that money spent. If someone came out with an $8/month streaming service, I'd scrutinize it fairly closely before contemplating switching.
Are you actually saying that you would refuse to use a service (all other things being equal) that was $8/month because $10/month is what you think is "fair?"
If so, I'd mark that behavior as strange, and not actually evidence of the existence of a "fair price." There's no way this behavior is typical.
If what you're saying is that you'd assume a price lower than $10/month would have other, unseen problems, then:
1) You're not referring to a "fair price" but instead a believable price, which is a compromise between what you want to pay (which is nothing) and what you estimate to be the price of delivery, and the odds with that price in mind that what you receive will be adulterated/lower-quality than advertised.
2) How is $10/month fair? No wonder musicians don't make any money.
Only if you assume humans are purely self centered rational agents. In practice, many people do care about what a "fair" price is and don't just charge as much as possible in pursuit of profit.
We are talking about music, not insulin. There's probably hundreds of millions of different songs including the ability to listen for free on radio with ads, YT etc.
This is an absurdly limited point of view. If I charge 3x as much as other vendors, then force them to raise their prices by firebombing businesses that don't comply, it might (conceivably) maximize profit, but most people would think it unfair, largely because it was founded on unfair restraint of trade.
I don't think the prices on music were unfair before. No one has to have music, and there was no evidence that the prices were enforced by unfair practices. They were just higher than people wanted to pay.
But most people would say that Enron's manipulation of energy markets was quite unfair.
> there was no evidence that the prices were enforced by unfair practices
Copyright is the unfair practice at work here enforcing high prices for distribution of information, a service which can be provided at practically zero cost when not restrained by force.
