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Downloaded Music Gets More Expensive
Reverberant writes "Just as the online music market is starting to gain traction, what to music execs want to do? Why, raise prices, of course! Under consideration is raising the price of online singles up to $1.25 to $2.49, or bundling less desirable tracks with hot singles."
Magnatune experimented with what I would term "tipware". Here, you pay a certain amount in excess of a minimum (like at a restaurant) as opposed to donationware where the minimum is $0. Data is available from this, and it might surprise you.
-I am an elective eunuch.
So no, iTMS isn't beyond this. Sure, tracks are still 99 cents but full albums are getting higher prices every day.
Virgin Megastores recently offered 6 CD's for 30, basically working out at a fiver a go. I bought my first Cd's for years during this deal, because music once again became affordable for me.
Similarly, a lot of people don't object to legally purchusaing music from iTunes etc. If they're going to push the prices up again, the same thing will happen, more and more people will turn to downloading it for free P2P. Untill the record companies wise up to these simple facts, we're just going to keep going round in circles.
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ITunes let's you listen to 30 seconds of each song. Generally speaking I think that give you enough of the song to get a feeling if you're going to like it.
The other day I was at Barnes & Nobles (Waterfront in Pittsburgh) and they have these neat machines where you can listen to the whole album (no 30 second limit per song) for every single CD in the store. These little machine have a built-in bar code scanner. Scan the barcode, it starts playing! I am sure somewhere in the store there is a big server with lots of MP3s...
Well, capitalism ( not competition ) is intrinsically designed to drive prices down, simply because of economies of scale ( ie. costs less per widget when a million widgets are made as opposed to when a hundred are made )
Competition can drive prices up or down -eg. In his classic book, Professor & psychologist Robert Cialdini talks about one common tactic to get customers to buy your product - RAISE prices!
Customers have this mistaken perception that price equals value, so higher price translates in their mind to valuable, lower prices to inferior/cheap goods ( this actually goes waaaay back, to Karl Marx's Labor Theory of Value )
The masses might actually buy a $5 song in the mistaken assumption that it is somehow more valuable than a song for $0.99.
"While that's still a fair price,"
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No, not really. Look here:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000002U
(the lameness filter will kill this, so I'll save you the trouble)
The NEW version of DSOTM is $14, you can buy it used from Amazon for $7.25
And you get the full version, not a compressed version.
So tell me again how $17 is a good price? Maybe for the record company, but certainly not for the consumer!
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
I like to be able to take even my legitimately purchased music and reduce it to the set of what *I* want to listen to. Isn't that my right as a consumer?
No, it's not. It's up to the seller, dude. It's the package they want to sell you. If their package is a CD with 12 songs on it, then you have no "right" to demand you only get one song.
If the concept you listed above was in fact true, I would be able to buy 20 seconds of a song because it's my "right" (it's the only 20 seconds of that milkshake song that i like anyway)!
A good analogy is telling picasso that you only want the top half of his painting for half the price.
To many people, the entire album is the art they want to share. If you don't want the entire album, you don't have the right to demand a portion of it!
Also, is it pretentious of me to claim that usually the rest of the album doesn't suck, but in fact people don't listen to it enough for them to appreciate it?
The iTMS doesn't play the first 30 seconds. I believe the authoring tool Apple supplies to the labels lets them choose which 30-second block is excerpted, per track.
Have you talked to artists? I have. A friend of mine got a record contract a few months ago. She's highly in favor of people swapping her music around. It gets her heard. She signed with an indie label, and they too are in favour of that.
If you're a small, independant musician, then the 'net is great, it gets your music out to people who would never hear about it otherwise. If you're a small record label, the same applies. You know who p2p sharing of copyrighted stuff hurts? The ones who don't benefit from the advertising -- the ones who are so heavily advertised that you already know about them. But guess what, These are the monstrously huge acts. These 'artists', including the pop band du jour, the current cute boy band, the mass-produced "edgy" rocker, etc. are not ones I have much sympathy for.
So yes, I've talked to an artist. A non-big-name, just-getting-started-in-the-bizz artist. She, and her company, are in favour of their songs getting out over the Internet, even if they don't make money from it.