according to an August 2000 lawsuit launched by 28 states' attorneys general (and the commonwealths of the Northern Marianas and Puerto Rico), the major record labels colluded with the major music retail chains to artificially maintain the price of compact discs. this is not, in itself, news. in fact, the Federal Trade Commission found much the same thing, although the labels were not required to admit to any wrongdoing or pay any penalty.

what's interesting is that the states' complaint (it's a PDF) asserts that a period of vicious price competition around 1995 saw the average price of a CD drop from $15 to $10. OK. let's take that number and map it against some of the RIAA's CD price-trend figures. the RIAA will have you know that:

Clearly there are many costs associated with producing a CD, and despite these costs the price of recorded music to consumers has fallen dramatically since CDs were first introduced in 1983. Between 1983 and 1996, the average price of a CD fell by more than 40%.

so, the RIAA says that the price of a CD fell more than 40% in 13 years. the states' attorneys general cite CD prices as dropping from $15 to $10 in about a year. that would seem to indicate that 80% of the RIAA's vaunted price drop happened in the last couple of years of the period they cite, when discount merchandisers like Best Buy, Circuit City, and Target touched off a CD price war. in other words, CD prices didn't drop until some cowboys came along and screwed with Big Content's cozy little arrangement -- you can guess what happened next.
coincidentally, the RIAA doesn't post any figures on the average price of a CD since 1996, right about when the FTC and the states say the RIAA's members started their price-fixing scheme.

update: i've also posted a story (complete with numbers and pretty charts) about how the major labels' price-fixing caused the slow-down in CD sales that the RIAA is trying to blame on file-sharing.