Much has been said about music prices nowadays, I remember reading somewhere that usually the 10 most sold albums in Amazon every week were below $10. That’s not a bad price, but let’s call it sensible pricing.

Sensible pricing is sometimes not enough. Some albums are so good you’d feel confortable paying $20 for them, and some of those $9.99 albums have only one half-good song. I found this 37signals’ article today: Jane Siberry’s “you decide what feels right” pricing detailing how some small record labels are letting consumers (I don’t think that word applies anymore, but still) decide which is the fair price for a CD. At this time, 14% paid above suggested. See it on Sheeba Catalogue

The Canadian folk-pop singer Jane Siberry has a clever system: she has a “pay what you canâ€? policy with her downloadable songs, so fans can download them free — but her site also shows the average price her customers have paid for each track. This subtly creates a community standard, a generalized awareness of how much people think each track is really worth. The result? The average price is as much as $1.30 a track, more than her fans would pay at iTunes

This is not new, magnatune has been doing that for about 4 years. They let you listen the full disc, then download it paying what you consider a fair price

And to help this cool ideas, if you like piano music, let me recommend you Rob Costlow (blog). It’s a great album to stop and relax enjoying the beautiful sound of a piano. And he could be called a piano hacker according to his biography:

By the time he was twelve Rob Costlow was annoying his piano instructor by adding unwritten endings to songs during rehearsals and recitals.