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.

Comments

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:A different approach to the online music market

[digidave]

News flash: The record companies do not pay for the studio time, producers, recording equipment or anything else associated with making an album. They charge the artists for that. Record companies pay for marketing and advertising, although even then some of that is billed to the artists.

Re:Greed.

[clifyt]

Any reason you sell in Ogg Vorbis? Seems a good way to shoot yourself in the foot just to appease the geek squad?

To be honest, I felt the same way about Apple's AAC when they first started off. *NOTHING* supported AAC except iTunes and the iPod. Well, if you exclude the wierd stuff that played everything. At least, they had a few billion in the bank to push it to the masses, whilst you have geek angst backing you up.

Personally, I can't stand the tone of Ogg. If you are playing garage metal (or garage anything) you may not notice it. Same with most MP3s...they sound better at higher rates, but I generally go with AAC (unDRM'd) these days as it doesn't sound as shrill at the same bitrate.

If you ever get your store working in a decent file format, send me an email! This is the one and only reason I'm not going to invest more time looking at your site. All in all, finding a way to listen to music shouldn't be about politics...the music should be the message, not the file format you listen to it in.

BTW -- WFT with the java music player for the samples? Are you interested in promoting the music as all or are you just trying to profess your love for the RMS and all things OpenSource? I like what you are trying to do, but I think its failing at the core message. You've got to decide if you are selling music or the OpenSource religion.