Published by
The Street
The Street
By Eric Reed In the late 1990s federal regulators noticed something unusual: Retailers no longer offered meaningful discounts on music. No matter what store sold them, compact discs always cost the same; usually $14.95 or $19.95 per album. The Federal Trade Commission investigated and discovered one of the largest price fixing cartels to that time, a collaboration between five labels to keep the price of music artificially high. The FTC found concrete evidence that the largest music companies in the U.S. had systematically broken the law. In a sign of things to come, it then settled the case f…