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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.
All of MP3 http://www.allofmp3.com/ already went from $0.01/MB to $0.02. This is old news.
you mean we're supposed to pay for mp3s?
Spiral out. Keep going...
I've never heard of this "404" record label. Or are they a group representing record labels? And why is /. affiliated with them?
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.
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
Here's a link to CNN article.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/28/downloads_ price_rises/
Nothing for you to see here, Please move along.
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
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.
If they raise prices they'll be even less competitive with the price of $0.00 that I currently pay per song.
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?
I think it was Steve Jobs who said Apple has contracts with the record labels to sell songs at .99. These contracts, if I remember correctly, were for at least 5 years. The same rumors happened last year in may. But, I guess we'll see what happens.
Here's one at CNN International.
Labels are like OPEC...there's no competitive pricing among providers, just THE price for the product.
Currently bidding on sig
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.
It will no doubt change as competition (i.e. Walmart, et. al.) enters the market. It's one of the most common fallacies in business to raise your prices to make more money (or conversely to have a sale). It takes careful research and testing to determine the correct price point to maximize profts. You can't just decide to raise more prices to get more money.
I've made up my mind and now I've got to lie in it.
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.
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.
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.
We're still talking about MP3s, right?
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.
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
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.
Not a bad idea, but I think they already have an existing cartel name. The Music And Film Industries of America, or MAFIA for short.
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?
So, you think that the record companies, who are already in a frothy panic because they think they're losing all their profits to those "p2p pirates" are going to suddenly become magnanimous and cut you a break by lowering their profit margin?
*chuckle*
Let me guess: you also swallowed that line about how the government will restore those pesky civil liberties you used to have once the War on Terrah is won.
Yeah, 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.
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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