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While the recording industry has been busy trying to shut down Napster and other file sharing networks, one company has been busy building a profitable business out of giving away perfectly legal professionally recorded music CDs. The truth is, they are not actually free. There is a charge of $4.95 for shipping and handling, but it is about as close to free as they can get and still make a profit.

FightCloud may have the formula with the potential to put an end to high priced music CDs and let the artists make more money per CD sold. This may sound like an impossible dream, but they are doing it right now with a small number of artists and recordings. The only thing left is too find how well the system scales as they add more artists and they and their artists become better known.

It remains to be seen whether this will reduce the amount of piracy, but I suspect it will. It may be that most of the music pirates who say they only do it because the price is of music CDs is too high are just rationalizing their actions. However, when they can obtain professionally recorded high quality CDs for less than $5 each, many people will see piracy as more trouble than it is worth. There is also a guilt factor that most music pirates won't admit, even to themselves. A $5 price tag lowers the barriers to doing the right thing and paying a fair price for the music.

FightCloud currently distributes music from a relatively small number of little known artists, but they are very selective. They strive to not distribute any bad albums. That sounds like a good strategy, since it's hard to imagine a discount rack when the full price is less than five dollars. They provide a way for new artists to get national exposure while still earning over $1 per CD. That's not too bad, considering the big record labels usually pay less than half of that amount to the artists.

So, how does FightCloud manage to make money for themselves and the artists at $4.95, when the big name recording companies say that most CDs don't make a profit at two to three times that? The answer lies in the much lower overhead of a company like FightCloud. They don't have the high production, marketing, and sales expenses of the big record labels. There is still the question of whether the FightCloud model can scale to hundreds of artists and millions of CD sales, but I think it is the first step in bringing the cost of music CDs down, giving the artists a better profit, and perhaps even removing the motivation for large scale music piracy.

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