If music was a commodity, its would be at rock bottom prices at the moment. And investors will shout out BUY BUY BUY.

Except, there aren’t as many investors these days that are willing to place their money on music as a commodity. However, there are ample investors in the development of consumption based music services with the proliferation of subscription based and streaming models (and I’m not just talking about Spotify). But thats another story.

The price of music these days is incredibly affordable and accessible to most people – in principal.

So I question the price war that HMV hopes to spark with iTunes with their launch of hmvdigital. They’re pricing songs at 40p (approximately US$0.63) vs iTunes’ US$0.99 or 0.79 per song.

I sincerely hope that this price position isn’t the result of cutting back on the amount paid to labels and/or independent artists. And if it does, please shows us the cost savings involved. If iTunes pays to its aggregators US$0.70 from each sale (and some would admit iTunes has the music industry by the balls and is still making a killing from its 30% margin), then how does 40p translate to aggregators – and in turn, most importantly, the artists and music creators.

In reality, HMVdigital already has a brilliant unique positioning – that they’re not tied specifically to the iTunes software, as opposed to Apple. That should be hurrah enough for a large portion of the consumer market who have been looking for solid alternatives to iTunes.

But of course, this benefits the consumer by making the cost of purchasing music even cheaper.

Nonetheless, in the world where artist and labels can reach out to their fans directly and let them decide a price, is cheaper better?