Todd Martens, on his LA Times Extended Play blog, has one of the smartest articles I’ve seen recently on the music industry: He tracks the decline in the price—or value if you prefer—of the record album or CD.

“Less than 10 years ago,” he notes “it was common for albums to cost $15 and above.” And today, he says, Amazon is now running specials on old Coldplay albums and selling them in download form… for $1.99! (Link via The Daily Swarm.)

(He even notes that the service has already been trying to unload Madonna’s newest at $3.99.)

His mini-history, a must read, calls attention to an often overlooked aspect of the trouble the record biz is in: Not only are consumers buying fewer CDs; they are paying a lot less for the ones they do buy.

Martens reviews the so-called MAP program of the 1990s, which was essentially a price-fixing program the labels enforced on retail stores. Once the FTC started to look into this, the labels backed down. That opened the door for the big box retailers to start using CDs as loss leaders, which was the first, crippling shot at the foundations of the nation’s traditional record store infrastructure, and ultimately saw the closing of everything from hundreds, if not thousands, of neighborhood stores to, in the end, mighty Tower.

But it opened up the era of the $9.99 CD, with $7.99 for new releases not infrequent these days.

(The MAP program, in turn, reminds us again that the record industry’s traditional way of doing business was based on three legs of, basically, criminality: Pay radio stations to play your music, price-fix to keep prices up at retail, and then screw the artists by not paying royalties on the back end.)

You can read all of this and feel a little bit sorry for the labels, I suppose. But you have to think back to those corporations’ salad days—the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, where list prices would go up a dollar every year or two, lead by so-called superstar releases. For those big albums, the labels would jack up the wholesale price 50 cents or a dollar, on the (correct) assumption that fans desperate for the new release by their faves would swallow the increase. The came the CD era, which basically doubled the cost of albums overnight, and the vast majority of the sales coming from the catalog.

It was kinda like free money, but also kinda like crack. So when the digital era, in turn, came around, you cold hardly blame the labels for being unable to visualize a world in which they couldn’t slap an $18.98 sticker on a CD and make their customers like it.