Hah! Guess I didn't realize that's how Amazon priced the music. So Crimson from Edge of Sanity would also only by 0.99?
No, basically someone just messed up with the Green Carnation song/album. I would guess that it's up to the label or digital distributor to tell Amazon how they want long songs to be priced, but this album was probably sourced through a lazy distributor and so Amazon's system just gave it the default treatment of 99 cents per song.
Edge of Sanity's "Crimson" avoids this because the version that Amazon has for sale is a multi-track version that comes to $7.92 either if the 8 tracks are bought individually, or if it's sold as a complete "album".
The correct way to long songs is to declare some tracks "album only", which means you can't download those tracks individually; they must be purchased in a single transaction along with all the other tracks on the album. The new Dream Theater is handled this way, for example. Sometimes this album price is simply the per-track price multiplied by the number of tracks, but often it is lower than that (for albums with many tracks) or higher (for albums with very few tracks).
It's funny that Green Carnation actually provides a good example of this. Amazon has two instances of "The Acoustic Verses" there. Both are identical in content, but one is simply $0.99 for each of the seven tracks, and the "album" price is even cheaper, $4.98 (a $1.15 discount for buying the whole album, Amazon declares!) Presumably the digital distributor told Amazon nothing except that this is an "EP", and so they gave it a cheap album price (even though it's 43 minutes long). For the other instance, the two longest tracks are declared "album only", so you're stuck with buying the whole thing as a package. But worse, the album price is $8.99, which is over $2 MORE than the individual tracks would be.
The cheap version comes from The End (as does LOD,DOD). The expensive one comes from Sublife Productions, who was the primary label for that release, and apparently they're a little more conscientious when distributing their catalog digitally. But of course it doesn't matter when both instances sit side by side right there for the customer...the $4.98 version means that no one will ever pay for the $8.99 version!
Sorry for the long-winded boring details, but this sort of thing actually presents a bit of a moral conundrum for me.
The $0.99 price for 'Light of Day, Day of Darkness' is basically a fuck-up. So from a moral perspective, is there really any significant difference between "buying" the album for $0.99 vs. downloading it for free? Either way, it feels like cheating.
Still, it's the album of the millennium, so go buy it for $0.99 if you don't have it already!
Neil
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