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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 . . . . .
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?
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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.
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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.
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?)
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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.
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.
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.
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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?
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.
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?!
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
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.
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