Co-Founder of Merge Records and former Superchunk member Laura Ballance has claimed that Aracde Fire's decision to sell their new album 'The Suburbs' for just $3.99 'devalues' the music business.

The pricing policy has paid dividends for the Canadian band, going straight to Number One in the USA and selling 150,000 copies in a week.

However, Ballance feels the way the band achieved this was less than fair saying, "Just to make it so cheap that it tips the scale. It’s tricky. I find the resistance I had five years ago to music getting cheap is being broken down over the years by relentless pressure. People want to pay less."

It is believed that somewhere in the region of 60% of the 150,000 copies of 'The Suburbs' sold were done so at the online price of $3.99.

Ballance went on to claim that perhaps the low price of Aracde Fire's record is possibly the only way to get people to stop downloading music for free.

“Devaluing music is something that concerns me greatly. But it’s hard to draw a hard line on it. At this point, people can download music for free if they really want to. If you’re trying to get people to buy music, people who wouldn’t otherwise, maybe that’s the way to do it."

(by David Renshaw)