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Music Labels May Seek Higher Download Prices
punxking writes "Some of the big music labels are now clamoring to raise prices for digital music downloads. From the article: 'Music industry executives said introductory wholesale prices for digital tracks had been set low to stimulate demand for online music sales but the success of Apple's music store had prompted concern that they may now be too low.'" Relatedly, the BBC is reporting that iTunes is under investigation in Britain for charging disparities between the UK and the European continent.
Not simply a case of greed. Record labels don't *want* online distribution methods to work. Sure, it saves them money. Whereas packaging and shipping used to cut into the price of a CD, no money needs to be spent to produce more copies of an digital/medium-less album.
However, the fact that iTMS is working means that people aren't buying CDs, which is an indicator that the "music industry" is obsolete. The fact is, you can produce an album on your own and get it on iTMS, use internet/viral marketing for your promotion, and bypass major record labels altogether. We don't need them and there business model anymore, and they know it, but they don't want you to know it.
Their big hope is to convince everyone that p2p sharing is immoral and online music stores are too expensive-- it would cost more than a CD and you don't even get a lossless copy or the medium or liner notes or anything. As long as they can scare us into sticking with medium-based distribution models, they still have a business.
So what I'm suggesting is, this raising of prices is just sabotage.