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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.
If this isn't the very reason we have anti-trust laws here in the USA, then I don't know what is.
Just then the floating disembodied head of Colonel Sanders started yelling Everything You Know Is Wrong!-Weird Al
Sheesh - that sucks. Right when I was about to start using ITunes, too. It's too bad - they finally find a product the consumer wants, and they squander it. All in the name of keeping bad artists in business. Let's face it - the talented and popular don't need higher prices. This is to support the one-hit-wonders that never sell a cd because their only good song is mixed with 10 other crap songs, and no one will pay $15 for it. Instead, they just pay 99 cents for the one song that was good. Good job, RIAA. Good job.
HighSchoolForever.com
Wasn't the recording industry nailed for trying to force retailers to up the price for CD's. Wouldn't this be just as illegal for Mp3 downloads?
Of course, you'll probably be long dead before the copyright on any high-quality digital recordings runs out, so it doesn't help you much.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
I don't know if people agree with me, but here's my rant.
Currently on iTunes a whole album costs $9.99, now I can walk into a music store and get the actual CD for $14.99.
Personally, if its only five bucks, I'd much rather have the CD. You get a pernament backup, the song lyrics and all of the other extras.
If you buy it on iTunes, you have to make sure to burn it yourself or lose it forever, and you don't get the liner notes etc.
Now, if the price per song increases, I'm guessing that the price of an album would increase as well. So that brings the price of buying the album online very close to the price of buying it from a brick and mortar store. So the arugment for buying online is even smaller.
It will be interesting to see what happens here.
redune.com: The World 3.2 Megapixels at a time
I read an article about this. It seems one of the reasons for the cost increase is to compete with ringtones. Ringtones are going for 2 or 3 dollars each, or you can get a subscription for 3$ a week.
This of course is insane. 2 or 3 dollars for a ringtone out of my tiny cel phone speaker is barely even something you can call a song.
Anyway, that's the logic behind it. Ringtones don't target people who want music. They target people who need to be hip and with the pop culture, so clearly people behind this are missing things.
The Financial Times, quoting unnamed music executives, said wholesale music prices, thought to be around 65 cents a song, were originally set artificially low in a bid to stimulate demand
lol!. I guess for them it costs more than 65 cents to make a copy of a 4MB file and upload it to servers? This is utter crap. They actually expect us to believe that a digital version of a song is more expensive than it's CD version? Not that it is for us now, but if they raise prices...
Since iTMS came to Canada I just spend the 99-cents (that's about 82-cents US, by the way) -- it's much quicker, easier and instantly satisfying.
But if they bumped it up to, say $1.20 per song -- I'll probably go find me an eMule client -- not that much more money, but psychologically 99-cents seems negligable. Above a dollar? That's real money.
Sam
Anyways, I don't see what's the point of using places like that. You're not actually paying the artist or record lablel. You might as well get your music from usenet and P2P.
$1 per song sounds OK because it's at that magical price point where most people will just say to themselves "Ahh, it's just a buck". The thing is, $1 per song is a bad deal. Let's assume the average number of tracks (songs) per CD is 12. If you wanted to get the full CD, that's $12. Except now you're getting it in some lossy format (AAC/MP3/WMA) that may be DRM'd (I'm thinking of other online music retailers like Wal-Mart, which I think uses Windows Media Audio (not sure if it's DRM'd or not)).
I know that not everyone wants every track, but when you're getting it in a lower quality format and at your own expense/time (bandwidth/time taken to download) $1 is a bit of a rip off.
If anything, the price should be dropping to $0.50 or $0.75. That'd actually encourage people like me to use these online services. And you'd think the music industry would like it because it's less physical content they have to manufacture and ship out to stores.
Hiking the prices just goes to show people that they can't trust the music industry, and that any trust that was fostered was misplaced.
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
because they are too expensive, and way to little goes to artists. MUCH too much seems to go to "distribution".
Yeah, Im gonna pay MORE on a digital download. Where "distribution" can be almost cost-less. Sure. Uh-huh.
Unless, of course, it is protected with a copy protection mechanism. Then copying per se wouldn't be illegal, but breaking the copy protection (which is necessary in order to copy it) AFAIK still is (IANAL).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Not in the long run. Paul Goldstein, a noted professor of copyright law from Stanford, pointed out something very interesting in a lecture I attended around 10 years ago. When music (or other copyrighted material, for that matter) is sold electronically (he was envisioning some kind of satellite on-demand streaming service, but the idea still applies), in a way that allows the sellers to keep track of the purchase history of individual buyers, then they could go to variable pricing that is variable per person, rather than just per song like you are imagining.
That is, they could figure out that you like that "fucked-up indie" stuff, and so charge you $4 for it, whereas if I think it is merely OK they might only ask $0.50 from me.
Note: Goldstein didn't say this would be a good thing. He was just pointing out the possibility that it might happen.
There was also some speculation as to how consumers could deal with this. I don't remember if Goldstein suggested this, or if it was something that me and my friends came up with while discussing the lecture later. Consumers could purposefully purchase stuff they don't like, in order to try to screw up the profile data, to keep the music companies from knowing what their favorites are. If buying a couple $0.50 songs from a genre you hate will keep them from raising one of your favorites from $2 to $4, it would be worth it. The music companies would probably tie in the purchase prices to the data from streaming services, so heavy music buyers could subscribe to streaming services, and have their computers listen to crappy music all day to skew the data.
Or maybe people could group together. Find someone who gets a low price on what you like, and for whom you have a low price on what he likes, and purchase for each other.
How can the music industry justify charging more than about $0.05/track?
I get my DVDs through Netflix, and pay about $1 per DVD (the whole thing, with any extras that may be on the disk). Netflix recently lowered their price (so now I pay about $0.90/DVD). Those are regular, effectively unprotected DVDs to watch anyway and on any device I choose (I sometimes rip them and watch them on my PDA).
Blockbuster and Walmart are competing for the same customers, and they charge even less.
CD music costs a lot of money to produce, but it doesn't cost 100th as much as a major movie (probably less than 1000th). Why are people paying so much for so little? Where is the perceived value?
I stopped buying major label CDs a few years ago, but increased my DVD rentals dramatically. There's no value in pirating DVDs at those prices. Studios are even moving the DVD release data closer to theatrical release (to reduce their costs).
While movie industry seems to be adapting, the music industry seems to be engineering their own demise. Not that anyone will miss them. Independent artists seem to be where the good music is these days, and they are much more reasonable in pricing their product.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
And you're forgeting that 'production costs' are taken off the Artists 10%. Which means that by the time a record 'breaks even', the record company already has a 900% return on investement.
/. archives that explains this in detail, but I'm too lazy to go look it up again.
There's a link in the
Ask 8 slackers a question, get 10 awnsers (a citation, but I can't remember from who)
here in the UK we are charged $20-$25 for a new album, $30 or more if the album is older.
You yanks get everything cheap but still its too expensive for you...
How many computers are too many?
That's a great idea generally, but it's not a solution. Sugar is sugar; whether it's granulated or caster or whatever, and whoever supplied it, it has pretty much the same effect. You wouldn't complain because someone put the wrong sort of sugar in your tea, would you?
Music's different. People don't want some music, they want some specific music. Okay, much of the time their decisions are driven by marketing, familiarity, and comfort more than by quality, originality and skill, but either way music is not a commodity in that sense.
Erm, I never mentioned drugs! I just mentioned sugar. (Though I'd be prepared to argue that processed sugar has drug-like qualities for many people living in the Western world...)
And I'm not advocating stealing. I just think that we might want to reconsider what we define as 'stealing' in this context. Until then, the law is the the law and breaking it is by definition illegal. But laws are not immutable...
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