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iTunes Might Lose Labels
Dreamwalkerofyore writes "According to the New York Times, the iTunes music store might have to change its 99 cents per song policy or risk losing a huge amount of songs due to recent disputes with record companies, who demand an increase in the cost. From the article: 'If [Mr. Jobs] loses, the one-price model that iTunes has adopted 99 cents to download any song could be replaced with a more complex structure that prices songs by popularity. A hot new single, for example, could sell for $1.49, while a golden oldie could go for substantially less than 99 cents.'"
good idea!
might change that 'it's new - it must be good' thingy people have in their heads..
Then I might actually consider buying music, given that I rarely buy "new" or "popular" music.
It was working so well, it was about time they fucked it up.
Great way for the labels and Apple to discourage people from using legal methods for downloading music.
But come on record lables, get itunes popular so people are addicted then when people are hooked change the prices. dont do it yet! (even though most people are hooked)
keanmarine.com
Apple goes out of its way and makes a system so that the record industry CAN profit from online media, and then they whine their not making enough! shoulda stuck with P2P, not like they're ever happy.
I expect that if this goes through there will be few if any songs that go down in price.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
The 99 cents per song you already pay is a bit much, especially considering there is NO physical packaging, shipping costs, storefronts with employees and power bills, ad infinitum.
I really LIKE iTunes, and I *KNOW* how to steal music if I want to. I really LIKE the fact that I can buy a specific song for a pittance on a whim instead of hoping someone will upload it to the Usenet.
It's not that $1.49 is too much, but it just shows that they will try to reach a price that people will accept, however grudgingly. But the $1 mark is a psychological barrier; once they reach that, people will start to think, "Is this song worth $1.49?" and might not buy it after all.
In any case, good luck to 'em. I don't buy any new stuff anyway. Most of it is crap pushed by the payola artists.
Useless opinions, worthless observations, and more!
Like it costs so much to record a song in this day of digital recording. 99 cents is plenty.
The record labels pretty much killed CDs by charging 20 bucks each for them, now they'll kill this outlet as well.
The only way to sell a song online if you are a musician and want to have DRM is on iTunes.
You can't sell it any other way, it's true that there are freely usable DRM formats that are supported by every portable player other than iPod. Unfortunately, iPod has 90%+ of the market share, and for DRM it only supports Fairplay.
Sorry that people don't realize it, but independent musicians are screwed because they cant sell protected songs for the price they want.
But whatever, people will never ever see anything wrong in anything Apple does.
Even Microsoft's DRM format is more open than Apple's!
This news reads (translated from the original RIAA BS) "Allofmp3.com will be adding new servers and registering new bank accounts to deal with the massively increased demand".
Just as irrigation is the lifeblood of the Southwest, lifeblood is the soup of cannibals. -- Jack Handy
Add me to the ranks of people who are no doubt turned off from using the iTunes music store because of this. I've been considering it for a long time, but if they're going to be increasing prices for new songs, count me out. I don't listen to much "popular" music anyway, but on the ocassion that I do want a new song, I'm not going to pay a dollar and a half for it.
Looks like I'll be sticking for P2P. And, despite what the RIAA says, I tend to buy the album if I really like it.
I would like to see an automatic pricing system where the song price may range from 10c to $2 and the price fluxates automatically according to the number of buyers. A "little" like the stock exchange, but with caps on the bottom/top prices.
That way, the really popular songs (as decided by the users themselves) would inflate in price and the more obscure songs will lower in price, which could give them more exposure which may then raise the price back up.
This could work well if Apple would expose the system used to calculate the pricing and the stats for each track downloaded. It would make things interesting.
Let free-market rule!
Zoom Player Lead Dev.
Of course, this could be their goal: to make iTunes less profitable and drive them out of business, then swoop in and offer a different service... Or maybe they want to make iTunes less profitible in order to drive music consumers back to purcashing CDs... ??? </conspiracy_theory>
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
If you live in Britain, iTunes songs cost 79p, or just over $1.42 at today's exchange rate.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Let them do it. Sites like AllOfMp3.com will just get more business (which appears to be totally legal). Why would anyone buy a crappy compressed song for $1.50? At that price it costs as much (or more!) as a regular CD with artwork and no compression!
I'm still waiting for the day when the general population knows about sites like AllOfMp3, where you can download an entire album in just about every popular format for around a dollar. You can even preview an entire album before purchasing, and the selection is pretty decent. Not as good as iTunes, but probably enough to satisfy a good chuck of iTMS users.
And given all this, the record companies want to make themselves look worse? Hilarious! Let them!
If this new policy is adopted, expect to see sales drop or at least level-off while piracy increases. Up until this point it has been a fair deal for FairPlay, and if these record companies demand more money for doing absolutely nothing but allowing Apple to sell the products and do all of the heavy lifting for them (and barely break even on it as Apple does with the iTunes store) they really are out of touch with reality.
They have found the sweet spot in the market and simply collect the checks. But the corprate mantra of constantly growing profits has taken over. Which is not a bad thing, but it should have manifested itself in the recruitment of new musicians, not the raising of prices for the hell of it. That of course, would take effort, and when you make more money off of an album than the artist does - after you have merely loaned them the money to make their next album - you get used to screwing people over as much as you can.
If banks worked like the music industry, you would pay 90% of your paycheck to whatever bank gave you a student loan 20 years ago - 15 years after they were paid off.
Music executive: "Hey, we're making a ton of cash money without any distribution or production costs. In fact, we don't really do anything at all, and get rich. I know, LET'S SCREW THAT UP."
--- witty signature
A variable pricing model would be fine with me. If iTunes were to include more indies and let each artist set their price, they we would end up with a dynamic model.
It seems to me that the primary problem with the music industry is the history of price fixing.
I think most capitalist economies are dominated with companies that subscribe to this business model. Of course, with the global marketplace it's not very easy to say where our economy stops and another country's economy starts.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Cd baby Works very hard at getting independant music on the ITMS. Cdbaby works as an middle party between the artists who don't really know what to do and Apple who don't have the will to deal with a million artists on individually. Cdbaby then gives the artist a ridiculously large percentage, iirc they can end up with 60c from a 99c song sale.
Well, then the music industry just lost another customer...
Pffft, they don't care about you. You're most likely too educated for them anyway. They want impulse buyers, not those who actually care about copyright. Their war on p2p is merely: 1. another revenue source, or
2. a publicity stunt, or
3. a lever to pressure their congressmen into creating more draconian laws, or
4. to reduce the "cool" effect (with questionable success) of p2p, or
5. an effort to shame some downloaders into buying the music they've illegally downloaded, or
6. two or more of the above.
I think the recording industry is finding that people are buying 1 or 2 songs from a given album, and paying 2 bucks for it. This contrasts with the $20 people used to pay for CDs. Instead of fixing the music so that albums are cohesive and compelling (compare Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon to today's "albums"), they think that they can skirt the basic laws of supply and demand.
Dear Slashdot,
Please help us think of ways to blame this on piracy. We're really stuck on this one!
Sincerely,
The RIAA
The US Army: promoting democracy through unquestioned obedience
With the rising price of gasoline, music companies must charge more for their products in order to make up for increased shipping costs.
Oh, wait. Nevermind. Yeah, they're just jerks.
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
I'm not surprised that they are doing this. If you think about it, 500 million sales == $500 million (this is total sales). As far as I know, that is pretty much small potatoes in this industry. To put this in perspective, Apple had $3.5 billion in revenue for the 2nd quarter of 2005 alone. By rough estimate probably less than $100 million of that is from iTunes. They are going to find ways to bring that number higher. The smart way to do this is to fit a market pricing model, price each piece of music to maximize revenue. If you like B. Spears or whatever (I don't) you will pay more for your music.
The magic of the $0.99 is that its magnitude and uniformity places it on that mental shelf reserved for things nobody will bother to steal. But, if Apple starts making some nothings "more equal" than others, then that shelf and mindset become endangered...
Seeing bad movies only encourages them. Watch responsibly
The more I think about this, the more I think it's pure and total BS. Apple has become the WalMart of music downloads. Apple accounts for more than half of digital music downloads. The record companies can huff and puff all they want, iTunes and the iTMS have become the WalMart of digital music. If they don't carry it, it doesn't sell. The record companies would be shooting themselves in the foot.
This is internet business we're talking about, folks. Retailers can track sales minute-by-minute, adjust prices moment to moment, and tailor prices to individual customers.
Replace the 'hot new hits' smokescreen with 'anything that's actually popular' and you have what the music industry actually wants. Does 'Highway to Hell' get more action than the latest push-the-star album? No problem.. that song gets a price hike.
It leads to a state of smoke and mirrors, where all the songs that sell less than one copy a month are $.50, anything that actually has an audience is $.99, and anything getting more traffic than normal, for any reason, gets kicked up to $1.99. Even more heinous, but technically feasible, would be per-user and related-hits tracking, so if you buy a $.50 song, all the 'other songs purchased by people who bought this one' go up to $.99 for you personally. In such a system, the only way to get the low prices consistently would be to buy random selections of stuff nobody else wants.
It's a great dodge, from a marketing standpoint. The labels can come out and say that 99% of the music in the iTMS catalog is listed below $.99, while quietly failing to mention that 90% of the actual purchases were at $.99 or more. Then they can wring their hands and claim that those "few" premium-priced songs are the only place they make a profit, and that anyone who wants to take away that price tier is just a nasty mean corpse-raping villain.
Personally, I'm amused that the labels are willing to play chicken with a company that recently announced a major change in its hardware platform. Apple (or Steve Jobs) certainly has the nerve to tell one of the big labels to take a hike if necessary, and it's not like the market is just flooded with other venues where the labels can peddle their goods.
The game theory of the situation is interesting.. if all the labels bailed at once, it would hurt Apple a lot. But if only a few labels leave, the ones that stay will probably do better business, since they'll have less competition. The more labels that go, the better the advantages for the few that stay. So basically, all the labels are in a position where they want someone *else* to sacrifice profits and teach Apple a lesson, while they personally stick around and glean the benefits of both the smackdown and reduced competition. But nobody wants to be the hero who dies for the good of everyone else.
All told, I hope.. and expect.. that Apple will stick to its guns on simple, flat pricing.
Most comments I see posted responding to this article use "99 cents" or $0.99. To make a cent sign in Windows, hold Alt while pressing 0162.
On a Mac, press Alt + 4.
Sometimes that "filler crap" is the stuff the artist thinks is their deep and meaningful contribution to the music world. Jefferson Airplane called their hit album the "Worst Of" with the assumption that big media filters to the lowest common denominator.
Most the time it is just filler crap.
Personally, I want a low enough price per song so I can afford to get the less popular tracks. As it stands, I've downloaded one iTunes songs so that I san say I downloaded an iTunes song. As it stands, I am priced out of their fixed price model.
Which one does iTunes sell?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
65 cents, actually. Apple pays CDBaby 0.70 per song, CDBaby take a 5-cent cut. Pretty cool deal for us indie bands that don't have enough of a presence (yet!) to get Apple's attention by ourselves.
(yes, i am totally shameless: http://www.meetgoodwin.com/
Furthermore, while the "put sale stickers on old impopular stuff" works for physical media, the costs don't scale the same way with downloads. This is nothing more than a way for major labels to leverage price increases...
There's no 'on' position on the Slacker switch!
Quite honestly, maybe the time has come when people realize that while listening to a good songs is a nice thing, but doesn't deserve the insane amount of respect and money it gets today. I just don't see the significant contributions to society of a rock-star that justifies the insane rewards they get... I know that plenty of people are sheep enough to idolize people to the extreme, but maybe the golden ($$$) era for music is over (independent music anyone) and the record labels just can't deal with the fact that they wont make these insane amounts of money anymore.
Deal with it, making music has become a lot easier and created new competition in the field!
Its not explicit like, "You will screw artists and prefer the dead to the living" but its in their 'product pricing' structure.
Corporate culture also screws things up for artists with the enshrining of the artist as a 'bitch-god(ess)' with whom its never about what its explicitely about (or some such clap trap.) This way they can keep up the mystery around the industry.
Satch'mo never went for it and, being black, they never went for him, 'cause he was just a dope smokin' 'nigger' and would never amount to much. SURPRISE! His sheer talent snuck in under their radar, (not hard since they don't know talent unless it hits them in the back of the head with a 2x4,) and he survived the killer, rat & roach infested, high colesterol, pace of life he had to live in order to pay the rent.
But they still held all the recording contracts so they didn't care.
There are books, lots of books, written about how shabbily artists have been treated over the years. Its not just a shame; its a crime.
And the people committing the crimes are doing so systematically. The music publishing/recording industry __hates__ musicians.
Sad, isn't it?
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
"The labels price things based on what they believe they can get -- a pricing philosophy a lot of industries have. But we like to price things as cheaply as we possibly can, rather than charge as much as we can get. It's a big difference in philosophy, and we try to help other people see that." - WalMart senior VP (entertainment) Gary Severson.
WalMart pushed the labels into a $9.97 retail price for CDs. Then they started signing deals with artists on their own. WalMart now has exclusive rights to Garth Brooks.
It's hard to cheer for either side here. But from the music industry's perspective, WalMart is scarier than Apple. Apple needs the music industry. For WalMart, audio CDs are a minor business. WalMart sometimes threatens to cut back on audio CDs and devote more shelf space to DVDs and games. And Apple doesn't care about content. WalMart imposes censorship on both music and cover art.
Pretty much no band is big enough to get Apple's attention by themselves. Bands on major labels have to heft of their labels to get them attention -- if not individual attention, then at least the attention that comes from being part of an established catalog.
Luckily for indie bands and labels (my shameless plug: http://www.loud-devices.com/) all the bands for which CDBaby acts as "online distibutor" together constitute quite a formidable alternative catalog.
One has to wonder: if the major labels do succeed in forcing Apple to raise prices on their releases, might Apple and the artists/label of the alternative catalog be able to keep the old, psychologically much more attractive 99-cent price point? If so, the majors might just price themselves out of the huge iTunes market, sending all kinds of new business to the indies.
Why do people have to be so incredibly cheap? This is just insane.
Not only does CD Baby do the above, but they actually have a human being listen to the files to ensure that they didn't get messed up, and to set up the "sounds like" links. You are easily getting a couple hours worth of work for $35.
Okay, if you don't have a bar code yet, that is an additional $20, but try registering yourself for your own barcodes, it is a heck of a lot more than $20.
Shawn's Tech Articles
Not likely, for two reasons:
- Digital sales are still a drop in the overall music market.
- The greed of the record industry is only rivaled by their stupidity.
Here are some nice quotes to demonstrate #2: The other main battleground in Apple's coming confrontation with the industry has to do with "interoperability" of services and devices. Mr. Jobs has so far refused to make the iTunes software compatible with music players from other manufacturers, and he has prevented the iPod from accepting music sold from competing services that use a Microsoft-designed music format...Hilary Rosen, the former chairwoman of the Recording Industry Association of America, agrees on that point. "If Apple opened up their standards, they would sell more, not less," she said. "If they open it up to having more flexibility with the iPod, I think they'd sell more iPods.Apple already dominates online sales, so opening their format and their players are just going to lose them money. They make almost all their money on iPod sales, so they'd probably lose money if they increased their song downloads by 50% if it cost them even 5% of their iPod sales. And increasing prices, the way the record industry wants to do, is not going to increase sales. Andrew Lack, the chief executive of Sony BMG, discussed the state of the overall digital market at a media and technology conference three months ago and said that Mr. Jobs "has got two revenue streams: one from our music and one from the sale of his iPods." "I've got one revenue stream," Mr. Lack said, joking that it would require a medical professional to locate. "It's not pretty."Excuse me? You pay for nothing in disutribution costs, pay for no part of running the store, get 70% of every sale as pure profit, and this "doesn't look pretty"? You fucking whore, Mr. Lack.The record industry has seen that online sales do pay off, but now their letting their instiable greed get in the way of basic common sense, and even good business sense. If Jobs tells them to screw off, they're very likely to say "okay", and proceed to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs.
New iTunes songs: $1.49
Kazaa: Free
Sticking it to the screw-the-buyer record companies once again: PRICELESS!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
At the price of 99 cents a song, the share of the major labels is about 70 cents
Apple needs to get their profits from the iPod, since most of the 99 cents is already going back to the record companies. What's so hard about this for the NYT to understand?
The other main battleground in Apple's coming confrontation with the industry has to do with "interoperability" of services and devices. Mr. Jobs has so far refused to make the iTunes software compatible with music players from other manufacturers, and he has prevented the iPod from accepting music sold from competing services that use a Microsoft-designed music format. As a result, songs purchased from Napster, for example, will not play on an iPod.
Ah, now we know the real reason why Sony is unhappy. Won't play on Sony players either.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
iTunes is becoming like Walmart for a lot of people, if they don't carry the album, people don't realize it's available.
I've stopped shopping at brick and mortar shops entirely for music, and the comment holds true for me. The other problem with CDs now is many are getting copy protection schemes that are far more troublesome (ie: Sony). With CDs it's becoming a crapshoot, at least with iTunes I know what I'm getting, my restrictions, and a way to get around them if needed.
If a major music company leaves because of their pricing greed, they'll soon realize they have nowhere reasonable to peddle their goods online, especially as more and more customers start purchasing music online.
If they force a different pricing model with higher prices, I will pirate my music.
I have purchased 201.78 CAD (168.87 USD) since the opening of iTMS in Canada.
Before iTMS, I would buy a CD per year at the most. Most years, I would not buy any music. I'm not interested in complicated prices models, differing DRM rights per song or subscription services.
I'm a mac user and none of the other services support my platform and music player. I don't blame Apple for that at all but rather MSFT and their desire to trap everyone on windows.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
That pricing scheme insures that we'll be mining the back catalog while the 'popular' stuff get zero play.
'Popular', meaning the latest 'artiste du jour' that they're warping into their 'sound', ripping off by making 'em pay for the studio time, the recording tame and material, the 'pressing' facilities, the 'cover art' and the promotion.
They're committing an internet suicide. You can't seriously do this without a broadcaster (and payola) structure. The buzz of an internet is completely counter to this.
When you (and I) can record, produce, publish and promote music at little or no cost, it makes no sense to go with a label.
This will mean the death of the ASCAP who will hate to start tracking playtime by song on an hourly cycle. And with an iPod shifting time, the results won't mean a thing anyway.
These **AA guys just love to shave by holding the straight edge razor against their necks and pressing down HARD.
They fuck up iTunes and I can predict their death as coming quite rapidly.
I can just see the ITMS front page:
"No non-indie songs anymore because the 'major' labels don't want to sell through us unless they can impose some nonsensical pay scales on us.
Indie music for sale at $.99 a pop."
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
There is one thing that really pisses me off about Apple's “one size fits all” business model: it's only reasonable for certain styles of music. What about contemporary art music, progrock, or jazz (styles of music I listen to heavily) where a 15-20 minute track is not an uncommon occurence? Hell, some of my favorite CDs have something like 3 tracks ($3) and 50 minutes worth of music. Are you telling me they're worth less than a punk album with 20 tracks ($20) and the same amount of actual music? As a composer, most of my works are 8min+, how does this benefit me? Had this price model been around during the mid 70s, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin would have gone broke, or would have been forced to put out cookie-cutter 3 minute tracks like every other shitty pop artist. Under this price model, punk artists become millionares, and art music professionals go broke. I've devoted my entire life to learning about, and teaching myself how to write better music; spending, litterally, THOUSANDS of hours on my own or in conservatory. Why is this suddenly a bad thing, and shunned by both popular culture and the corporate model?
Apple, I love you to death, but fuck you're business model; price by the second, not by the track!
Also, don't get me started on “The Death of the Album”, I couldn't be unhappier to see artists forced to write soully on a song-to-song basis because chances are that listeners won't buy their whole albums. I was just getting really happy seeing artists coming back to writing whole albums that work together as one body of work, to see it destroyed by the new revolution.
Sure, this model puts pressure on artists to raise the level of quality from a song-to-song basis, but it also gives them an incentive to write MORE and SHORTER songs, since, “if I split the track in two, I'll make more money,” right?
—EricMultiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
When I go to a record store or large retailer, the new releases are always being sold at a special discount price. Later, they go up in price, not down. Why would the record companies be pushing something that is inconsistent with the way they sell the physical CDs. One other other point: if prices are going up I want higher quality tracks. $1.49 is way too much for 128kbps.
I hope that Jobs doesn't cave in to this, but Apple already gives perks to labels that indies like me don't have.
Tracks on itunes from a major label can be browsed by genre, but indies aren't. The only way an indie track comes up is if you search it by name. ITMS has other positioning-perks for labels too, and these count for a LOT when you're competing for cyberspace. I don't think the perks would exist unless Jobs wanted to curry the labels' favor.