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Jobs Resists Music Industry Pressure
Drew writes "Steve Jobs is opposed to raising the price of online music sales, calling the music industry greedy, and
implying that price increases will bring about more piracy." From the article: "It may not seem like it, but it has been more than two years since the launch of the iTunes Music Store, and that alone has the music industry brimming with hopes for price-adjustments. They also don't buy Jobs' argument that a price increase will result in more piracy, but probably not for the reasons we might assume. I've long been of the conviction that piracy is not nearly as large of a problem as the RIAA makes it out to be." Also covered at Macworld.
No, they're not going to raise prices so you're not "paying pretty much the same price as a cd to have it in a proprietary, non-portable format with no artwork and nothing tangible."
"This is considered plagiarism."
Jobs works for $1/year at Apple and gets some bonuses from Apple board of directors sometimes.
...) he lives in a normal house and sends his children to public schools. Gates lives in a bizzaro fun house and Ellison lives in a fake Japanese McMansion.
Most of his wealth is in the form of Pixar stock - and he doesn't give that up because he wants to retain control of the company.
Unlike a lot of rich people (Gates, Ellison,
Yes, he is not hurting for money. But he doesn't *live* like a greedy person. He could be getting paid more at Apple than he does if that was what he cared about. I think he cares more about retaining control at Apple than he does about money. He retains control by keeping Apple healthy, and also by keeping his "moral authority" by being the guy who works for $1/year.
Whatever you might say about Jobs, he's a person that I can have some respect for. He lives his life pretty modestly, works very hard, and cares a lot about quality.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
No, people don't use it because it's on *extremely* shakey legal grounds that are only mitigated by the fact that Russia's legal system with regards to copyright is all over the map. In addition, lossless files (up until recently) were transcoded out of 320 kbps MP3 files. Not very honest of them.
Japan? Cheap? Are you talking about popular music? Because last time I went to Japan, a popular new release could run anywhere from $20-30, which is much more expensive here. Most of the cheap CD's I found were used.
I think a lot of people assume that using iTunes/iPod you are stuck with DRM software. You aren't people. You only get that with PURCHASED music from iTunes Music Store.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
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No, the message is muddied by the cobranding of F/OSS software and propoganda throughout the site.
e nseFAQ.html
And the idea that Ogg isn't supported natively on either Mac nor the PC is a perfect example of why this is a bad idea.
Do I know how much licensing for MP3 usage is? Sure -- if you are making less than $100k a year, its absolutely free. Its not worth Fraunhofer / Thompson's time for anything less.
If you are making over this amount, then we are talking a royalty rate of 2%. Thats right, if you are bringing in over $100k, you might have to pay a small token amount in royalties. I don't know about you, but I pay a *LOT* more than that for my licensing / taxes / software for my online business (I have worked for the music industry in the past, and still do consulting within this area...$2k ain't much if you want to be taken seriously).
So $10k? Where did you get that number? Obviously not from folks that license the product:
http://www.mp3licensing.com/royalty/emd.html
If you are worried about royalities (and want to stay unencumbered by DRM), take a serious look at AAC. The only charge there are for encoders / decoders. It looks as though your site is already encouraging an assbackward software package to encode into OGG on the client side...so why not just use iTunes to do the conversion -- that too is free. I know there are several free encoders on the Linux side as well (because I had to batch transcode several gigs of waves over to this and it was faster to just use a spare linux box and let it do this in the background).
But if you want to see the royalty rates on AAC, take a look at Dolby's site:
http://www.vialicensing.com/products/mpeg4aac/lic
As for being able to play music -- I can't play it without a wierd format that isn't supported by my hardware. At least all my current hardware can play WAV / MP3 / AIF / AAC all without having to transcode it. So, yes, it matters, because I can't hear it. I didn't buy from the iTMS either until it was supported by a large (more than 10%) of the players sold.
But yeah, its part of my job to know this stuff. Again, I agree with your commitment to open source, but don't take it as a religion. Use the best tool for the purpose. Otherwise, it looks at those you are more about promoting F/OSS than you are promoting another means to an end for musicians -- which again is a noble cause. Why don't you do an experiment? Set your store up to sell both Ogg and MP3 (or AAC) and tell the end use they have to pick which format before buying (give them the choice to download all 3 if they want once the experiment is over) and stop the experiment just before $99999 in sales (or whatever you hit for the year) and see what sold the most. You might be surprised...hell, if ya published it, *I* might be surprised.
Sorry if my last post seemed antagonistic in any way -- I didn't mean it that way, but the "Since you seem to know everything about online music though" comment seems as though I was. No, I understand the marketting of musicians and this is one of the reasons the big industry is starting to fail -- they are more about marketting themselves and promoting what is good for the industry but not necessarily what is good for the artist. And this is exactly what I see when I visited the site.
Focus on the musicians and nothing more....