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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
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...
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.