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MP3 Download Prices to Rise?
OBeardedOne writes "The major music labels are in talks with music download services attempting to get them to increase the price of music downloads. " Sounds like there is division in the ranks of the music companies, but something to watch.
From my standpoint, the piracy fire has not been put out yet. Increasing the cost of music is just going to push people away from paying for music.
I guess the music companies still think free music is taking away from their profits, even though it isn't free anymore...
Because the cost of manufacturing has...
Er... Because they have to hire more employees to handle the purchasing load...
Er... Because the Britney Spears needs a new swimming pool for her poodle... yeah!
Isn't it time we just declare the RIAA a monopoly and start regulating it because, obviously, there is no competition.
I wouldn't pay more for legal downloads than what they already cost. If it costs the same as a CD I'll buy the CD if I want to be legit. A CD is lossless and comes with the little booklet anyhow. Plus, no (non-laughable) DRM.
Only in a Slashdot fantasy can a Slackware install turn into several hours of sex . . . . .
Like here for example. Not to mention you get your choice of formats: ogg,m4a,mp3,wma. And at about a dime a song you can't beat it.
From an analyst quote over at CNN:
"If piracy was somehow stamped out, the environment could support a price jump, but that's irrelevant so long as illicit downloading is alive and well,"
To put it in human terms, piracy is keeping the price of songs low.
Can we please put to bed the myth that piracy drives up the cost of software and content? It doesn't.
Here's one at CNN International.
Labels are like OPEC...there's no competitive pricing among providers, just THE price for the product.
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What REALLY pisses me off about this whole sham, is the fact that digital downloads are already pure profit for the labels. No packaging, distribution, or printing. Pure profit. And it's just not enough to fill their bloated CEO's coffers. Sue your customers for downloading illegally, but charge them an arm and a leg to do it the "right" way. Piss off, RIAA. You'll never see another dime from me.
The prices of songs via mp3 are already maintained at an artificially high price. This ensures that the price of downloading an album via mp3 is roughly synonymous with the price of purchasing the album in a large retailer. Since the user is paying for "shipping", and packaging and materials are non-existant, it seems to me that even dividing the pie between the distributor, the record companies, and the artists, there's more than enough to go around as is. There's no justification for asking us to pay more for mp3s. Perhaps if they paid for our cable connection...
I was hoping to see the end of the album format, with the exception of concept albums or soundtracks or long classical works and such. Artists would just release a new song when they had one worth peddling.
Actually I wonder what kind of contract Wal-Mart has with the major music labels? I would suspect that any increase in fee would first require voiding or extensive reworking of the contracts that are outstanding.
My concern, if the labels get an increase in their fee what is too stop these retailers silently increasing their "costs" behind the scene?
Frankly the labels get too much of a slice of the fee as it is. I would like to see how much is actually given to the artist per sale. I would suspect that a lot of older music gives less than a cent per sold song to the original artist.
Higher than 99 cents? Only if I can get it in the format and quality I want. Only if I have a permanent right to have the song at my disposal. Get near 1.99 and it they can kiss the business model good-bye - which may be what they are after so later down the road the can release their own services.
All this begs the question, if the per song fee increases what happens to the all-you-listen-to sites like Rhaposdy and Napster?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Apple doesn't sell MP3 files, only AAC & Audible.
btw, the link doesn't work either
... but why title this "MP3 Download Prices to Rise"? Can you actually legally download MP3s these days? Allofmp3.com sounds decidedly illegal and everyone else offers various flavours of DRM restricted shite. Surely "online music stores to increase prices" or something would be more accurate?
Sure this could drastically decrease their count of their catalog, but the labels might get a clue: 20% more of no sales is $0. Then they'd be begging to be added back with the old price.
AC comments get piped to
"nailed" is hardly a word I'd use to describe what happened to the recording industry for the CD price fixing. They got away with a slap on the wrist.
IMHO, the prices are too high already, at least for me.
At a buck a track, I *might* consider buying 'em if they were losslessly encoded at at-least CD quality, and included metadata, "liner notes", etc... basically all the goods I can get at roughly the same price in a physical CD.
But in a lossy, DRM-infested mess... why the hell would I pay the same amount?
If they get the price down to 25 cents... or maybe even 50!... then I might consider it. Until then, it's back to the used-CD bins at Amoeba for me.
Can there be a statute of limitations on collecting money for music?
There already is. In the States, it's called the Copyright Act. It expires 95 or so years after the death of the artist, at which point the content becomes free for everyone (public domain).
However, since that time is totally arbitrary and determined by the U.S. Congress, whenever it's about to expire, various Vested Intrests will simply lobby their CongressCritter to have the Act extended.
the article:
What? Thanks largely to Apple, the "music industry" now actuall has a market. Without iPods and iTunes, and the Apple Music Store, this money -- 65 cents/song wholesale times some HUGE number -- wouldn't be going to the "music industry" at all."Ok, our distribution costs have been reduced to pennies on the dollar, and we have all but cut out the middle man, (the traditional distributor/record store paradigm) but we want to raise prices"
Give me a break. Piracy is down, costs are down too, now you want to steal from consumers to make up for your "lost revenue" due to piracy, punishing honest music purchasers with increased prices.
Don't even get me started...
l8,
AC
Ok, ok, I'll bite..
Seriously, I get tired of hearing this "It'll cost you $10,000 to fill your iPod from the music store!" argument. Truth is, you can easily import your own cds... If you don't have enough CDs to fill your iPod, then you can go buy a used CD for $4 at a local record shop and work it out to about $0.20/song. I personally don't fill my iPod up on purpose, because I use it every day as a disk drive... but that's another subject...
The other great thing? If I import my music myself, there is no DRM... period... yes, even when using AAC or Apple Lossless. Perhaps it's just me, but I like knowing that I can always re-rip my music into the format of the moment (no putting up with a set bitrate by my provider) and still be able to listen to it on any (modern) machine... including sending it to as many friends as I want, if I so desired. Much better than renting my music that will only work on windows machines when it wants to let me.
The music industry is apparently unhappy with Apple's increasing share of the market - the firm sells about 65 per cent of songs sold online. The arrival of cheaper iPods is likely to give the firm an even larger share of the market.
I do not understand the music industry's complaint here. Someone (Apple) is selling their music online and they are unhappy about this? Were they complaining when Virgin, Best Buy, and Tower Records were gobbling up the physical CD market?
What complaint could the music industry have against Apple? As long as the music is being sold, what does the music industry care? They agreed to Apple's contract.
Cheaper iPods will also lead to Apple selling MORE songs. That is the reason that Apple will have more of the market. Yeah, the music industry definitely has a right to complain - one of their resellers will be selling a lot more of their product. Gotta hate it when that happens.
Meanwhile it was confirmed on Friday that the European Commission is investigating allegations that British consumers are being ripped off by Apple's iTunes service because it charges more for downloads from the UK site and does not allow punters to buy tracks from other country's iTunes sites.
I always thought that a Brit's inability to buy from another country's iTunes store is because of licensing restrictions. That is, that Apple is not allowed to sell a song to a Brit that Apple only has the French distribution rights to.
I suppose the EU is supposed to rectify a lot of these problems, but I daresay that the contracts between Apple and the music industry follow the older, country-specific licensing agreements.
How much of this could also be chalked up to England still using the Pound, and not going over to the Euro? Will the EC only be happy when it costs EXACTLY the same in England (with the pound) as it does in France, with the Euro? Would Apple have to change prices daily to keep up with the exchange rate?
(Yes, I realize that English iTunes is still way too expensive in comparison and should be brought down. I am just not so quick to blame Apple. Maybe the contract the music industry came up with in England just charges Apple more per song?)
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
This statement right here says it all. One might initially read this as a bit of sane thinking from one of the labels re letting the industry grow, however when you think about what it means you see that the greater plan is more stifling prices.
The only current cost increase that the RIAA could justify is annual inflation. Their distribution costs are taken up by the online reseller (iTunes, etc), their printing costs are essentially zero, just convert a master song copy to digital format and deliver to online distributor once. And their advertising costs remain the same since they are not (to my knowledge) producing any advertisements that forward online music buying specifically.
The only explanation for the price increase is that they simply want more for the same or less service. And the wording of the one abstaining record label here says it all: not yet mature enough. i.e. They planned to milk consumers for all they possibly could once it caught on, but most of them have gotten tired waiting for the plan to come to fruition and have jumped the gun. In other words if they had waiting another X years/Y% user increase/[insert marketing threshold here] then everybody would have been on board for this as they'd planned it all along.
Could someone who is a lawyer or has the time to research the appropriate links please explain how the RIAA in doing this is NOT acting as a monopoly or cartel? As I understood it, price fixing by an industry that is not justified by some external cost increase is explicitly illegal, regardless of whether it's a smokey back-room deal or done in the public eye under the guise of an "association".
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
Dear RIAA
For every artist you represent, there are 1.000 artists you don't. If we are not allowed to sell your music, we will start taking all unknown artists into our store and let word of mouth decide. We will do this after buying Apple Records and make deals with every lable we can get into this. See those white headsets aroud the city? Each one of those are connected to one of our customers.
Yours faithfully,
iTunes Music Store
PS: we are going to sell the music of unsigned and independend artists no matter what you do, so follow the bandwagon or miss the concert.
Any time you are using a single source/vendor for all of your music needs, you are at the mercy of their management (directly for profit motive or indirectly through the negotiation skills with the RIAA). Oh well, all the fanbois will praise Apple and claim it is about time they raised the price! Now we can pay the same as a real cd in the store even though distribution, packaging, storage, and inventory costs are not required for the digital copy. My god man, think of the artists.
The main idea is to milk the market. Have a bunch of recodrings for every major age group, from youngsters, teen, college students, 25+ , 35+ etc... and make them pay $15+ for them.
And then charge the group with the most demand inelasticity the highest price, this is even more than the $15 ammount. The RIAA does not understand that the the music industry is changing; or believes they can still stop the change and it is a matter of time before they change or be changed. They will fight tooth and nail so they can reap their profits.
After all record companies make money from borrowing money from financial institutions. And these institutions charge them interest rates, and these institutions want their money not matter what this includes the 10% interest etc...
Also due to the extreme large spectra of artists the quality of music has gone to the euthanasia clinic. Way too many young inexperinced people playing the tune of the music producer. Most people listen to this stuff because they have no alternative choice; for background music. Let the RIAA milk the market, it is time we put a cieling on the price of music. I say no less than 50cents and no more than 99c. And have certain protections for the consumer. I mean there are two ways to make money, charge a higher price or sell more units. Selling more units that is to create demand is hard when all you have to sell is crap so they do option number 1) ; which is to raise the price.
It is time most consumers got smarter and said hell with the current distribution. The RIAA is nothing but a conglomertation to give people the illusion of happiness, after which they will milk you for your money.
Let them raise prices and let's see what happens... there will be less songs sold.
Am I the only cynical bastard who thinks the labels aren't fishing for any $.09 rise? I am thinking more along the lines of raising "selected" song prices to $5.00. Sure, you can still have the filler tracks for .99, but the "hits" would probably go up big time.
*sigh* here we go again.
It's legal in russia. You do the transaction in russia, in rubles. They've paid a license... the RIAA has absolutely *nothing* to say about this as they aren't involved.
When will americans learn that their own screwed up system does not apply in the rest of the world?
I agree with the two anonymous coward posters who got modded into oblivion. No one forces you to buy anthing, so I can't see how they "ripped you off enough". You are simply rationalizing your theft. Much like an employee who "suplements his unfair pay" by stealing from his company.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
It's along the lines of when someone 'steals' a db full of personal data from the bank. The bank still has the original copy, so nothing has been 'stolen', right?
http://www.walmart.com/music
Ummm... no, they ripped me off by charging more than they should have for a product that I bought. Furthermore, they are ripping off artists, who, in all fairness, should get at least half of the royalties from a CD sale. Given that CDs are so cheap to produce, I think is it fair to say that the average CD-buyer *does* get ripped off, mainly because most of the money goes straight to the pockets of people who don't deserve it.
There is something wrong, when my musican friend in malaysia can produce an album for under $10,000 while its almost impossible for a major label to produce it for less than $150,000. Yes there are ecomonic diffrences, but last i checked, it was not that great.
Listening to his album, most of the songs are good. When is the last time you bought a major album with more than one or two good songs? I thought so.
Record labels go for quanity, not quality. If they can get an artist to make an album with a couple hits but mostly filler, they can save other hits for other albums. Then they get consumers to pruchase all albums when they were only going to listen to a couple tracks.
Single downloads kill this model. Because now its possible for consumers to download the hits, and just leave the rest of the tracks be. The idea of raising prices is to get the album revenue out of just the hits.
This may work if they take an adaptive pricing model. They charge alot for the hits, and less for the misses.
The music industry is changing. Label, relying on album sales and licencing revenue, are in a bad postion. Artists dont make much money off of album sales as it is, but it helps promote them and thus increases thier other revenue sources such as concerts and sponsorship.
Label will have to move from an album sales company, to a promotional/financing services company. If they dont, they will become insignificant. But on the other hand, if they still can keep getting musicans to sign stupid contracts and keep funding and create another revenue source by sueing pirates, they might be around longer than they should.
In America we are imprisoned by our fear of them.
It is their right to set the price of a product they own to whatever they please.
It is not your right to choose their price.
This is nothing more than an attempt to justify theft.
Essentially copyright, as stated in numerous places, simply gives those who control the copyright the "right to copy," or produce those works in question. It started with books and, surprisingly, US booksellers reprinting British books without permission, meaning that british authors received no money from their work while the US booksellers profited. It was akin to piracy, and it's simply a form of piracy control.
Does this mean that it's equivalent to theft? No. That doesn't make it "ok," though.
So many artists essentially get something akin to a mortgage in order to produce music nowadays (and it's been this way for a long time) that I no longer feel that these 'artists who sell gold records living in poverty' should be held to higher standards than the labels that gave them the ability to do so. Labels pay for studio time, instruments, session musicians, mastering, distribution and more all up front, before an artist sells a single record or goes on tour, that I feel yes, the artist does owe the label something for giving them the chance to express their creativity to a wider audience. Some of it sucks and some of it's good. That doesn't absolve consumers of responsibility to purchase goods that are released for sale simply because they feel it's "unfair to the artists." Many of those same artists are poor with handling money and fame and fall on hard times on their own accord. Plenty more do quite well, releasing an album every few years without ever having to work a regular job. Boo hoo.
There's a great deal of indie music with fair record labels and well-paid musicians that are waiting for your money, if you feel the major labels are doing something wrong. You don't exercise civil disobedience by illegally downloading music -- you exercise it by boycotting those labels and enjoying independent music.
And FYI, if you have the vinyl record, you're allowed to make copies for personal use. You could download that album via P2P and RIAA wouldn't have a leg to stand on against you, if you already owned the release.
This story really shouldn't be filed under Apple at all, but it caused me to (once again) think that the headline was quoting Apple Computer Inc. I know Slashdot is determined to be the most asinine useful web resource on the net, but why do section stories under Apple have headlines that misleadingly attribute quotations to Apple?!
Correction, that's $9.99 of compressed DRM. Or I can pay $15 and do whatever the hell I want with the music I legally purchased.
Make me a friend and I'll mod you up
The precise reason that illegal file sharing of music has been so popular is because music has been overpriced for a long time. Once these labels recover the initial production costs of the album, it is nothing but profit. Most concerts are organized for the artist to make a buck, but even then the labels take the lion's share. The labels seem to enjoy profiting at the expense of both the listener and the artist. People who avoid buying music at all costs simply see through this. The others don't, which is why you see a bunch of crap on the Billboard charts and particularly the iTunes "Top Downloads". Who is buying this crap? Not anyone with a brain
But you're not free to distribute those copies as you see fit.
After the copyright expires? Of course you are.
Grandparent poster was advocating a limit to how long a company is allowed to sell music at a given price, after which it would be free, or cheaper.
No such limit exists, nor should it.
I don't see what "misconception" you're driving at
The misconception is that the price of a given work on the open market is related to whether that work is still protected by copyright or not. When the copyright expires, stuff does not suddenly become free for the taking.
Let's concoct a fictitious example because I'm too lazy to go look up a real one right now. Let's say there's a movie called "My Trip to France." This movie was made in 1920, and so is long out of copyright now. But the only existing master of this movie is a film negative sitting in a vault owned by Mister Louis B. Meyerstein.
The copyright has expired, you say, so you should be able to have a copy of "My Trip to France" for free. Louis B. Meyerstein is unimpressed by this reasoning, and offers to sell you a copy on DVD for $19. "Outrage!" you cry. "The copyright has lapsed!" Meyerstein replies, "All that means is that if you have a copy you are free to make a copy. It doesn't mean that I'm legally obligated to give you a copy of the copy I already have."
See the misconception? "Public domain" does not automatically equal "free." Or even "cheap." It just equals "no longer protected by law."
It seems to me that, from the point of view of the record labels, when most people buy a CD they are paying 15 bucks for the 1 or 2 songs they know and like. The others are just lagniappe. So, again, from the point of view of the labels, they are dropping the current per-puchase revenue from 15 bucks to a single buck.
BEFORE you shout "FLAME ON", Johnny, I'm not saying I think this is a GOOD THING, just that it may be how the record labels view it. It explains why they are so against music downloading.
Take a commodity: sugar, say. If I sell sugar, I can do so for any price I wish. I can also sell sugar of any type or condition, provided that a) it's safe for human consumption, and b) I'm honest about what's in it. I can choose to sell for a ludicrously high price, but that's okay because someone else down the road can sell for a lower price, and unless I can provide people with a genuine reason for preferring mine, they'll buy his. So it's a free market; it tends to regulate itself.
Music isn't like that, though. If I want to buy a track from an RIAA artist (legally, in my country), then I have to buy from an RIAA-approved source. I can't go and get the same track from another source. So it's not a free market in the same sense; it's more like a cartel. Under those conditions, maybe it's not quite so just for the cartel to choose whatever price it likes?
Music is also different in another major way, as discussed in other comments: if I steal some sugar, then not only do I get to have it, I'm depriving the original owner. But if I copy music, although I get the benefit, the original owner doesn't lose anything. So copying music is only like theft of physical objects in some ways; in others, it's different.
These two reasons make me think that although music copying is wrong according to the law, it's not a wrong of the same type as physical theft. And maybe it's a wrong we need to reconsider.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
Well then please explain this Mr. Economy. If I can buy music now on a physical CD and it only costs about a $1.50 per track and the recording industry makes a profit off of that even after accounting for the costs of the physical cd, printing, and shipping, how could they not make more of a profit off of me buying for $1 a digital file that has virtually no reproduction costs?
Also, I never said that tracks could be made for 65 cents. Of course an original track costs more than that to make. But since they can then reproduce it as much as they like the actual cost of one of those copies goes dramatically down. Obviously down to $1.50 at most for the physical copy since they make a profit at that price. Much less for the digital version.
Sure, but the non russian artist never sees a nickel....
Just keep letting them steal the songs from you and pretend to yourselft that it is legal.
It's along the lines of when someone 'steals' a db full of personal data from the bank. The bank still has the original copy, so nothing has been 'stolen', right?
What happens in that case is, someone illegally 'accesses' a computer system, illegally 'copies' sensitive data, and then illegally 'steals' money using that data.
Saying that the data was stolen is convenient, but you're right when you point out that stealing isn't really the appropriate concept in that case.
If you believe that record companies make unfair profits, the way to combat that is to boycott their products, not to steal them. You can always look for indie bands.
This doesn't work. The record companies just blame the lost sales to piracy and get laws passed guaranteeing them money. Here in Canada now I'm paying the record companies everytime I backup my computer. And if I was a musician I would be paying them everytime I recorded a CD
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
How the fuck did the record companies 'rip you off'? Seriously? ...snip...
Geezus, you are a fucking moron...
I would consider illegal price-fixing to be ripping people off. Seriously.
Likewise, if I steal a bunch of data and just have it around for kicks, then I have broken the law, but since I have not profited off it, very likely no one will know I stole it, and there is little chance of prosecution. Now, if I start bragging about the theft, or start selling it, then a crime will be created and more likely prosecuted.
To further push the analogy beyond it's limits, the difference between a database of person identifiable information and a song is the the later is public information, while the later is not. To make the analogy comparable, one would in fact have to sneak into the recording studio and steal songs that have yet to be released. This likely does happen and is, and has always, been prosecuted quite differently from simply personally making a copy of legally acquired album. There is after all a difference between copyright violation and theft.
Which is to say stealing MP3s or databases of personal information is bad if one has to go through illegal means to get it. Which is why the DCMA is so broad and insideous.
I think quite a few people probably have gigabytes of personal information from the banks. It does not seem that hard to do. Most proabably just keep it as trophies, showing it off only to the most trusted freinds. It is only the greedy that get caught.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black