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RIAA's Nasty Easter Egg
Bruha writes "It appears the RIAA is being very low key about the fact that the five major labels think that 99 cents per song is too cheap, and are discussing a price hike that would increase the tariff to $1.25 up to $2.99 per song. I was a huge fan of the 99c per song, but if they think that they can raise the price on me just because I don't buy full CDs anymore, they've got another thing coming. Suggestion: make good CDs, and maybe I'll buy the whole thing."
well, the worst deal i've found on itunes has been .99 for a 4 second interlude track (janet jackson, i think). the RIAA needs to either make better music, save money by stop paying off radio stations, or die. well, it doesn't need to, but it would be nice.
Don't worry - its just stigmata. Pass me a napkin and don't you dare tell my mother.
Can someone (that doesn't work for the RIAA) please explain to me how this isn't price fixing and at all legal?
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2B1ASK1
On another tangent, they may be shooting for the first reverse discount I've ever heard of: Since online distribution is competition to CD sales (their traditional business), they need to make CDs appear to be a better bargain. By increasing the price per song online, they have given CDs a discounted rate without ever really discounting them.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
Why not make the prices fully variable and a function of the rate of downloading. All music would start at 0.99 per song. If the rate of downloading is high, the price would creep upwards until the rate of downloading slows. If the rate of downloading is low, the price would subside. Maybe the good songs are worth 2.99, maybe the sucky one are worth only 0.25 -- let the rate of downloading set the price.
And if you really want to use a market mechanism, then let people put in bids. When the price of the song drops to the bid price, the bidder gets the song. If the bidder wants the song sooner, then they will have to up their bid.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Well, considering that the RIAA still hasn't figured out that the ridiculous prices CDs sell for is one of the major reasons why illegal filesharing became so popular in the first place, I'm somehow not surprised that they don't realize this point, either.
I think maybe they've been milking so much money for so long that they don't realize how expensive their music is. How else could they not reason that if I'm not willing to pay $14-$20 for a CD, why would I be willing to pay something like $15-$40+ for electronic copies of the music where I have to worry about keeping it backed up incase of hard drive crashes and I don't get to have a copy of the jewel case, liner notes, etc.?
At this point in time, I only have legal music on my computer. I've been trying to take the moral high ground and stick with golden ethics even if it means giving money to these shitheads. Granted, they're still shitheads so I try to stick to (truly) indie labels, used CD's, and $10 albums bands sell at their concerts. If they go through with this plan, though, I think I'll change my operating mantra from "turn the other cheek" to "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" and download a copy of every single filesharing program I can get my hands on.
What bands are you listening to?
I'll never understand this. Why do people listen to songs from a band that can only turn out "3 or 4 good tracks", when you could buy an alblum from a good band and get an entire CDs worth of good music? Is it really that important to you that you get those three tracks, or can you live without those few songs that will end up never being listened to after year? Must you stay current with whatever's popular?
I really am tired of hearing about how a CD will only contain a single good song or two. Bands that are creative and sound good through an entire alblum do exist, people. Maybe you should try looking at sources other than MTV for what you want to listen to.
http://cylan.deviantart.com/gallery/
"99 cents a song is a pricing model designed to protect CD sales, and not one designed to move people into a new digital music marketplace," senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation Fred Lohmann told us recently. "If an iPod has room for 4,000, does Apple think people are getting to spend $4,000 filling it with music?"
Why is the EFF even asking a question like that? That's economics....that's business....that's marketing. That has nothing to do with My Rights Online.
(Yes, I'm an EFF contributor, but they shouldn't be worrying about how much a music track should cost...)
This wouldn't surprise me. Although a service like iTMS doesn't turn much of a profit for Apple it's certainly very successful, and definitely doesn't help the RIAA with it's argument that online music sales won't work and that piracy is killing their business.
An alternative is that perhaps the RIAA has seen that online music stores can work and they want to kill the opposition by raising prices before introducing their own service.
It's a personalised 128k mp3 stream that adapts itself to your musical taste. If you don't want to hear a particular Janet Jackson track again, you never will. No fixed $$$ per month (although they are happy to accept donations)!
No downloads though - and right now I expect that there are few people in a position to receive a "broadband" stream in their car, so it won't solve that problem immediately.
Still, assuming you're not in your car you get your taste in music but with no "entertaining" DJ spiel and no adverts. Can't be bad.