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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.
Am I missing something? They're going increase the price of songs so you're paying pretty much the same price as a cd to have it in a proprietary, non-portable format with no artwork and nothing tangible? What benefit would people be getting from the iTunes music store at that point, exactly?
There needs to be a shift in paradigm. The simple fact of the matter is that older people have paid time and time again for the same music. They bought it on LP, Cassette, CD, DTS Disc, DVD Audio etc.
Sure, something fundamentally needs to change with the record companies and their formulaic approach to building bands, instead of finding real talent out there, but that is a different argument.
The fact of the matter is, I should be able to rip my CDs, and purchase music online for whatever price, then I am on record as purchaseing/owning the right to listen to those songs. If 5 years from now songs that I have purchased already have been re-mastered from studio recordings and are now available in lossless, DTS 5-channel, MPEG-2 10 channel, whatever... I SHOULD BE ABLE TO FREELY DOWNLOAD THE NEW VERSIONS as they represent a more accurate representation of the recording I purchased the rights to hear. The money I paid was for the recording the artist laid down in the studio. If there is a new means of transmission that more faithfully reproduces the listening experience of that recording, great, give it to me. If not, when I purchase that song, give me the reel-to-reel, or DAT tape, or whatever.
How come no one has ever brought this up?
The idea that the prices of music should go up is ludicrous. There is a site out there called AllOfMP3 that charges a nominal fee based on the file size, and it allows you to change the format and bitrate of files you download. It is, quite possibly, the most sophisticated online music store out there. I can get a full album for 1.10$. Since the site operates out of Russia, Russian copyright applies.
It's revolutionary, and it's a model that iTunes could stand to look at. Never will I pay 99 cents a song again.
As the price of reproduction drops, the price of the item should drop correspondingly. At least that's how the economic theory goes. Profit margins drop but profits are made through bulk sales, much like today's commodity ethernet cards and memory chips. It allows for many companies (or artists) to create a product, spurring competition, providing choice. All of this is good for the consumer.
Yeah, the RIAA is still trying to stick it to us.
Everytime I hear of music piracy, I always think of the quote that I believe Justin Frankel said in relationship between Napster and iTunes. The basic philosophy was that the music industry really screwed up by not catching Napster soon enough. By the time they offered the pay for download services, people already knew they could download free music. This meant that every time someone bought a song from iTunes, in the back of their head they were saying "I can definitely get this song for free somewhere." To this day, that's what really is driving the P2P downloaders, however many of them are left.
The music industry is just greedy and they're completely out of control. Someone needs to shut them down and quick. However, without their money many artists probably wouldn't get their albums published, so it's kind of a necessary evil that we have to deal with.
And this come from the man that prevents ITunes music from running on anything other that an IPod and prevents Real from releasing DRMed music for the IPod.
Next he'll be saying that the movie industry is charging too much for all the product placement.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I remember when it didn't used to be a crime to listen to music.
Ok. First of all, I don't know exactly what they're talking about - online or Pressed CDS. But, selling a song for $.99 or $9.99 an album WITHOUT HAVING TO PRESS A CD, MAKE COVER ART, have a jewel case, and truck it to the stores, is pretty steep. I was part of a survey a couple of years ago asking "how much would you pay to download a song?" I answered, "$.25" Asked why, I answered, "Because the music publishers do not have any media costs other than bandwidth and royalties. Excluding the royalties (which are a constant), bandwidth is MUCH cheaper than jewel cases, CD, physical distribution costs (trucking of the CDs, etc...) and the artwork."
In short, I think Jobs is right on the money here.
Evil people don't think they're evil. - George Lucas, Making of Ep III
But why not cut out the middle-man? We don't need "the music industrie" for on-line music do we?
Artist -> Online shop -> Customer makes more sense to me.
The online shop (iTunes for instance) could take care of the marketing as well.
The glass is half-full. With poison. And there are cracks in the glass. The dirty, dirty glass.
The seller of a product will usually set the price of a product to a level that he thinks the market is able bear without turning to alternatives (theft, competition, abstinence, etc.). If the good ole' boys over at the RIAA think that $9.99 for a downloadable album is not enough (and trust me - they do!) then they'll explore every nook and cranny if they can get away with charging a few bucks more! Businesses have no sense of 'fair', 'good', or 'evil' - they produce a product and will try to squeeze as much profit out of their customers as possible. If the profits are less than expected than they will try to 'instill demand' (think advertising and other types of brainstorming) to somehow part Joe Shmoe with part of his earnings.
At the end of the day, it's a voting game - they rise the prices, we go back to piracy. Trust me, economic consequence is the only language they understand. Companies are by default pathological entities that have no compassion, vision (in most cases at least), remorse, or concience. It will squeeze you for all you got - that's why it is a commercial entity! The democratic mediator is the consumer and obviously most of the responses on this thread (it just started and I'm an early poster, but let me just guess ;-) will be against a price hike. If nothing else the RIAA is looking in the wrong direction - as competition brews I believe that these prices should come down, not go up. After all, there is no physical media involved and selling bags of bites is a great business to be in...
And of course for non-chart music, you could probably pick up the actual CD for less just by scouring eBay, zShops or even a sale in a regular bricks & mortar store.
I'll probably get modded as a troll for not saying "apple R0X0RZ", but whatever.
check out the best blog ever:
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The difference between Steve Jobs' wealth and the RIAA is that Steve grew his own business and continues to do so. The record companies want to raise prices for doing nothing. Being a billionaire is not necessarily a sign of being greedy if you work for it. The RIAA is a bunch of middlemen that lets others work for their wealth, so they are decidedly greedy.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Nothing by George Harrison
See "Apple Records vs. Apple Computer".
I am sure this is a casual comment by Jobs, because he is in the catbird seat and has no reason to worry. He has the power here.
What are the labels going to do if they don't like the terms of iTunes music store? Go to another store? No.
1. No other store has near the volume or reach of Apple's. No one else has the brand recognition or ease of use.
2. By far the number one music player is the iPod, and only the Apple music store can sell protected music files that work on that player. The labels could try and sell unprotected MP3 files but this seems unlikely.
So going above 99 cents per track means either convinving Jobs (not likely) or moving music off the Apple music store -- which means lost sales and possibly more piracy. Not going to happen. Jobs is in a great position.
Because iTunes isn't operating out of the ex-Soviet-Union.
Oh, please! Piracy and the "n word" are two completely different things and topics altogether. The "n word" (I don't feel like typing it here) isn't just a descriptive adjective, it is a racial slur. Piracy is a term used for infringing on the copyrights of software and music by copying it without the owner's permission. Please never compare "piracy" to a racial slur (especially the "n word"); it makes you look immature and ignorant.
And you condone piracy? Hey, I can't stand the RIAA's practices as much as the next Slashdotter, but shouldn't the artists get fair compensation from their works? If we don't buy music from the artists, then the artists won't get compensated for their performances. Piracy, to me, is selfish and doesn't reward the artist at all. Now, do I believe that the RIAA should be suing 13 year olds left and right? No. However, I believe that piracy is wrong and shouldn't be condoned.
Just NEVER compare piracy to the "n word" ever again!
He's charging you for the development and maintenance of the iTMS interface, as well as for the not insignificant cost of negotiating deals with the labels for distribution and sale. I'll gladly pay him--what is it, 5 cents a song?--to do all that dirty work for me.
..kinda. iTunes lets anyone who makes music submit their music to iTunes database now. This really cuts out any kind of middleman, and the people who want to hear music, get the music they want.
Of course, becoming an actual record label might not be a good idea. First of all you have legal issues with Apple (I doubt Apple could afford to buy Apple Records), then you have the "expected" crap that artists get; the cars and the image and all of that junk. Then you have to fight with MTV and the RIAA to get any playtime. And by the time you've gone through the whole cycle, you're just as bad as the record companies that exist now.
iTunes is allowing the model of music to change. Instead of skimming as much as possible, and giving it back in the way of highly-discounted cars, album deals, etc, Apple can just let the consumers consume. And the artist gets the big part of the money made. Win-Win if you ask me.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Not to just post 'me too', but... me too.
Out of all the arguements i can make against the music industry today, the 'i only like one song on the whole CD' thing is not one of them. Never applies. Maybe there are occasionally two or three songs on an album that i actually don't like, but i have never bought an album where i only liked one or two songs.
Maybe if you guys didn't listen to such shitty untalented artists you would like more of their songs.
Although I am morally opposed to DRM, I have to give Jobs his props. Not only did he pioneer a successful music store, but now he's refusing to bow to the man's demands. The RIAA is a bunch of whiny white-collar assholes who know nothing about music or the consumer. They think that "IP" entitles one to rule the frigging world. Jobs had to put the DRM in there just for them. And now he refuses to raise the price. I'm glad that he is standing up for us (at least somewhat) and I am glad Apple is taking a different stand than Microsoft, who basically jumped unerneath the covers with the RIAA. I think we'd all agree that musicians should be paid for their work. I think we'd all agree that the ideas of "royalties" and "licenses" are out of date. Finally, I think we'd agree that artists aren't getting the fair share of their money. My question is how do we have music that doesn't violate Constitutional rights (DRM, namely), and is fair to artists as well? The last concept is that derivative works MUST be allowed. That restriction is completely biased toward the artist. The Constitution clearly states that copyrights can be levied by congress for the progress of the sciences and useful arts. The RIAA has this attitude that by copying music, "pirates" are taking something from the musicians. The musicians either have talent or they don't. You can't take talent from someone who has it just like you can't give it to someone who doesn't. The RIAA tries, but WYSIWYG...GIGO. I've thought a lot about the "perfect" model for musicians, but I can't seem to determine how to compel people to pay artists for copied music. I figure they can still sell albums and such. Once someone owns the CD (in a personal property sense) then he or she owns the atoms of that CD. Therefore, he or she should be extended the same property rights he or she would be if he or she owned a chair or a desk or any other object. The RIAA has said, however, that music is "licensed" to buyers and therefore they don't own the CD. I never read or signed nor agreed to any license when I bought any CDs. Their rights end where mine begin, and vice versa. I can't tell them what music to make, so they can't tell me how to use my music. Imagine if when you bought a chair, you were required simply by buying the chair to use it only in a specific way, such as a dinner-table chair. What if you needed to use a chair in your living room for some reason? Too bad, a new chair would have to be bought.
Seeing as how the labels still own the catalog and can distribute through anybody they please, Apple is no more likely to become a monopoly source of downloads than Wal-Mart is of CD's.
Apple is essentially in the position of being a huge music reseller, like any record store. That's a very different thing from becoming a music label.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Uh, last I checked, Apple wasn't registered as a 501c non-profit. He pays most of the 99c right back to the record companies - he could only lower the price a few cents before Apple was taking a direct loss on every song (even without figuring in development costs, etc). Unless, of course, the record companies agreed to reduce the price they charge Apple.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
Uh huh. Stevie boy is a good old guy with no ego. Just a normal guy you can respect. And Bill Gates he's the devil incarnate. Well, the billionaire philanthropist devil incarnate, who's donated 7 billion dollars to various causes as diverse as AIDs research and the United Negro College Foundation.
Oh but that's just good press for Microsoft you say. So what? Running the largest charitable foundation in the world is an excellent way to get good press, and it benefits people all over the world.
So Jobs gets a $1 salary. Wheee. And a Lear jet, and hundreds of thousands of dollars in reimbursements from Apple.
I'm not trying to say Jobs is the evil one. Hell, both of them are business men, both have used nasty business tactics (if you think Jobs is a saint, read some of what Woz has said happened at Apple), both of them are rich and can afford a fancy house or personal jet plane. There is no reason to deify or demonize either of them. But buying into Apple's PR image of Jobs is just silly.
(Larry Ellison however, IS the devil incarnate)
Sometimes my arms bend back.
I don't believe parent is talking about the end-user machines the content is delivered to.
If you don't think there are real costs associated with distributing music, you are mistaken. The server space, the CPU, and the bandwidth needed to store, process, and deliver the ~5mb/each songs to the end user, are not free. Apple pays royalties on the songs and pays for the above, so their profit, while significant, is not 100% of the money they get.
I, for one, applaud Jobs - instead of succumbing to pressure and using the price increase to increase his profit margins, he's doing something decent by resisting the record companies' pressure. Granted, his motives may not be entirely altruistic, but nevertheless, Apple is setting a superb example that, no doubt, many companies will follow. If Jobs keeps prices at 99c a song, competing services will hardly be able to raise prices without losing customers to Apple - something they decidedly do not want to do. So in this case, Jobs is keeping the market stable in the face of significant pressure from the record companies.
The age of free legal (or even semi-legal) mainstream music has come and passed. You still have advertisement-supported radio, but to legally get ad-free, high-quality music, you can no longer go to a source like KaZaa and BitTorrent and expect the transaction to be risk-free (although I haven't heard of anyone being nabbed for getting MP3s from newsgroups, IRC, or various FTPs.) Not to say that there is significant risk - about 15 of the ~1200 tracks on my iPod were obtained through "good" sources, and I've yet to hear a word from anyone - but it is no longer as convenient or as safe to download them illegally as it is to buy them. This creates a balancing act between the difficulty of obtaining music freely/morality/risk factor and the price of legal music, and Jobs realizes that disrupting that balancing act by raising prices could create a trend of dissatisfied customers that decide to switch to illegal methods.
What puzzles me, though, is how blindly record companies are pressuring the distribution networks that are, in a way, their safety net for the tech-savvy majority of the highly appealing 18-25 demographic. While I've stopped expecting intelligent decisions from them long ago, the RIAA are now crossing the boundary between pure greed and pure stupidity. I believe that this will, eventually, kill them, and I, for one, have no objections to that.
Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.
Wrong -- at least two of his three children do attend a public elementary school in a SF Bay Area city. Technically it is a public school, but when the average housing price is >$1 million in the school district, you're hardly talking about your average neighborhood elementary school; the parents pay property taxes instead of tuition.
Why, I bought some the other day! I have a record player right beside my monitor here, and I have records released in the oh-so-distant year of 2005 . . . in other words, don't lament the death of vinyl yet! For exactly some of the same reasons parent notes, vinyl is enjoying a bit of a comeback. Two of my newer ones (Sloan's 2003 "Action Pact" and ...Trail of Dead's 2005 "Worlds Apart" have some nicely on-par-with-oldskool artwork throughout, and at least, they're far beyond what I would have gotten with purchasing the CDs of each.
Okay, admittedly, it depends where you live. I actually spend most of my time in Edmonton, MiddleofnowhereAlberta, and here it's damn impossible to find new vinyl. Most of what I currently have I picked up from Zulu Records last time I was in Vancouver; every record store I went to there, though, had actual records, so I'd go as far as to say that in major cities across North America you'll be able to buy new vinyl with at most a small amount of hassle (the ones I picked up at Zulu Records were little pricier, if at all, than the CD version would be; and to be able to find an unopened copy of "Surfer Rosa" for less than a new CD of the album would be is just wonderous).
On a more topical sidenote; it does get a bit tricky when speaking of modern recordings, as to the sound quality. I was tempted to pick up a copy of "With Teeth" recently, but I resisted; true, the track order is even different and includes a song not on the "normal" version (Trent Reznor notably recently railed against the terrible lack of options for packaging nowadays with CDs, and so like he often does, the vinyl release of his latest album gives a big thumbs-up to vinyl collectors), but I had to admit that I already had the dualdisc version . . .
See, older albums would have been recorded with analog means, but anything relatively recent is going to have been recorded at least in a large part digitally, and mixed thusly and so forth. So often analog won't give you nearly the theoretical audio-quality increase that it used to with older releases. Furthermore, as is the case with the aforementioned dualdisc version of "With Teeth", the album might come in higher-than-CD quality digital, with characteristics that vinyl can't reproduce (in this example, having been recorded and engineered, by someone who really knows how to do this, in 5.1).
So, alas, vinyl has its strong suits and its weaknesses. But it certainly beats iTMS quality, for more than just the cover art question, and I could never give up the ability to flip on Side B of "Surfer Rosa" and here that "whooooooooo-stop" as Where Is My Mind begins with those slight, slight crackles audible clearly at the insane volume I've turned it up to . . .
So, parent, props to you, I mostly agree, but I'm going to paraphrase: Break out the old turntable, grab a favorite vinyl from a store, and remember how music still can be!
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!