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Music Exec Fires Back At Apple CEO
geniusj writes "Warner Music Group CEO, Edgar Bronfman Jr., has fired back at Steve Jobs in response to the Apple CEO's claim that having variable pricing for iTunes music would be 'greedy.' From the article: 'To have only one price point is not fair to our artists, and I dare say not appropriate to consumers. The market should decide, not a single retailer ... Some songs should be $0.99 and some songs should be more. I don't want to give anyone the impression that $0.99 is a thing of the past ... We are selling our songs through iPod, but we don't have a share of iPod's revenue ... We want to share in those revenue streams. We have to get out of the mindset that our content has promotional value only.' Perhaps iPods combined with iPods are selling music as well, and it's not just a one-way street?"
I don't think so. Why should they deserve a share of iPod sales?
Anyway, ignoring Slashdot's poor editing... .99 should be the maximum, and variable pricing should only be available to LOWER the cost to provide a better value to their CUSTOMERS.
is not fair to our artists
:)
!?
We are selling our songs through iPod, but we don't have a share of iPod's revenue ... We want to share in those revenue streams
= greedy
Did they want a share of walkman revenue "streams" in the 80s and 90s?
Maybe the record companies should get a cut of every CD player and stereo system ever sold?
An oil industry spokesman said the oil industry should not have to use its content to promote the sale of vehicles for Hummer or anyone else, and not truly share in the profits.
“We are selling our gas through H2, but we dont have a share of H2’s revenue,” he said. We want to share in those revenue streams.
The cash register industry did not return calls seeking comment, but representatives for the tobacco industry are reported to be participating in high level talks with the AMA.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
So I guess no songs should be LESS than $0.99. Apparantely that is the minimum value for all music clips of any length or quality. Oh, and I like how they want a cut of the "iPod" revenue. Maybe they should go after CD player manufacturers and home stereo's too, by that logic. Classic.
fuck the golden eggs. we demand platinum!
Because he reminded me of Jabba the Hutt. Come on, Apple! He just wants to share your revenue!
I regularly report MSN spam to the Hotmail admins.
"We want to share in those revenue streams."
Doesn't that statement just reinforce the greed?
-sp
Some songs should be $0.99 and some songs should be more. I don't want to give anyone the impression that $0.99 is a thing of the past ... We are selling our songs through iPod, but we don't have a share of iPod's revenue
:\
So yeah. It will never be cheaper than 99 cents. We don't want to give people that 99 cents is a thing of the past, but we want a piece of the pie, and 99 cents isn't doing it.
Real bright there guy. You suck.
Tell you what. Let's go variable then. Songs older than 5 yrs are 50 cents. More recent non-top 100 tunes are 99 cents, and top 100 are $1.50.
Of course that will never happen.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
That's all well and nice, but raising the price of a song by ten or twenty cents means that your local artist may now receive another half-cent! Don't you feel like you're helping out now?
What? Surely it should read:-
Some songs should be $0.99 and some songs should be less.
Oh wait, hang on, this is the music industry we are talking about isn't it?
Perhaps:-
Some songs should be $0.99 and some songs we should be able to bend you over, take you from behind and rape you for the bitch you consumers are.
. . . would be more appropriate.
Let the market decide? Oh give me a freaking break. There is no market, not in the free market economics sense of the word anyway. I can buy petrol, gas, cars, PCs, coal, condoms or even a blowjob from any number of suppliers. This competition drives down prices and forces companies to compete on quality and price. Copyright guarentees as monopoly on your product. If I want to buy the latest white-stripes album I can only buy it from one label: V2 Records. Sure I can go to different stores to try and hunt down a lower prices but V2 set the price. The consumer only has one choice: buy it, or don't buy it. In a real free market economy the consumer has a third, more powerful option, to find a cheaper supplier.
This is terrible for the consumer and almost always leads to disproportionate prices. Rather than supply and demand setting the price of the music, V2 can simply mandate it and then it will be so. The market becomes distorted and everybody loses except the labels. There's this idea that the artist somehow needs to be compensated for his work and that's fine but why not do it off ticket sales for concerts? I don't see why we need these artists need these government granted monopolies to make money!
Simon
Since when does the supplier legally tell you what you can sell a product for?
Generally, that is considered illegal.
But hey, who am I to talk, I haven't been convicted of price fixing, so how should I know?
Oh wait, they have.
Some songs should be $0.99 and some songs should be more.
How about some songs should be $0.99 and some should be less?
Feel the fear and do it anyway.
I have posted this on slashdot before but I think it warrants posting again for this article.
We all have seen the many publisher provided services for purchasing E-books, E-Music, and Software Downloads.
These services try to limit your options and choices or even to remove them from you totally. With many of these services you must agree that you do not even own that which you wish to purchase in order to buy it. Instead they license you right to use their private property.
We see the prices on the virtual which rival that of the physical. We instinctively know that the production cost of a E-book, Downloaded software, or MP3s is so much less than the cost of a compact disc or a printed book both of which require paper, ink, artwork, packaging and so much more that is totally lacking from the ethereal versions.
Their sales decline. "Stop the thieves" they cry out into the night! Make more and harsher laws to protect that which is already protected they demand of our governments. Protect our property and damn their rights is their idea of an ideal. I am a honest person is my vehement reply. So why attempt punish me for the crimes of others.
They attempt to smother new technology on the premise that it may possibly be used for illegal activity.
While it is not my intention to justify the misappropriation of their material I must point out it's their own fault really. I blame their lack of foresight and their lack of anything resembling common sense. They do not exploit the markets available for them or if they do it's a halfhearted attempt. In the real world people are not buying what you sale one common step generally taken is to consider lowering your prices until your sales pick up. This also applies on the Internet.
In a concise conclusion I state that I personally prefer to compensate the authors and composers of the material that I so enjoy in my daily life. Currently I do so off-line. So Publishing and recording industries I say make it worth my while and convenient to do so and I will be one of the first in line online.
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
What about really bad songs? If the price can go up from .99, wouldn't it only be fair that some crapo, band-doesn't-even-take-it-seriously songs should be cheaper? I can think of a number of 30 second songs that aren't worth a buck.
...We are selling our songs through iPod, but we don't have a share of iPod's revenue
...We are selling our songs through iTunes, and we have a share of iTune's revenue??
Shouldn't that be
I actually think variable pricing would be OK -- if it went the other way. Make some songs 99c and some less. After all, music is part of the computer world now, and in the computer industry prices only go down. :-)
As for wanting a share of the music player revenue stream and needing to "monetize their product", what's wrong with the ~75c per song of pure profit that they're making now? Music labels didn't get a cut of Walkman or Discman sales; why should anything change now?
Greed. :)
"The market should decide, not a single retailer" I'm pretty sure the market wants it to stay at $0.99.
As for wanting a share of the iPos revenues, they're dreaming.
Did they just go from "it's not fair to our artists" to "we want ipod revenue"? I dont see them begging for every walkman sold.
Some songs should be $0.99 and some songs should be more
And now it's not about some beeing cheaper, just that they want more than 0.99 for popular songs. That's obviously not greedy at all.
The exec is exactly right. Used CD stores are proof that the market demands a lower-cost place to purchase certain songs.
I'd like to see a DRM technology that allowed music buyers to resell the music on eBay... By allowing the owner to set the price, you allow reselling and variable pricing... the studio (original owner) could get a piece of every transaction...
Amazing magic tricks
Do TV studios get a cut of TV sales?
Do software developers get a cut of computer sales?
Do game developers get a cut of console sales?
[Insert countless other examples]
Ummm... No.
This is b**sh** from one point of view. A company may choose to invest a lot of money in a band and in promoting it, but these expenses will be paid by selling more songs, hence more revenue. On the other hand, it's up to the band (or angency, or record-company) how much they want to ask for their music. Eventually it's up to the fans if they want to pay ie $2,00 for a song or maybe $3,00 for a whole album. I think this shouldn't be up to apple, who's just a reseller of music...
Perhaps iPods combined with iPods are selling music as well, and it's not just a one-way street?
What?
If apple bought the rights to redistribute the music and wants it priced the same for all titles, I say, more power to them. If eddie wants to pay a differnt price, buy the music some place else.
yeah dude, totally... wtf is with that
That's the best suggestion I've heard so far. Even if 99 is the lowest the music industry wants to go, what about 99 for stuff older than 5 years, $1.25 for newer stuff and $1.50 for top 100 stuff? It might get people to look a bit more broadly than whatever's on the radio today, and in so doing realise what dross most of the top 100 is, compared to stuff that has stood the test of time. And if not, well at least the record industry's mammoth profits are mostly at the expense of people with poor taste ;-)
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
This only makes them sound even GREEDIER than Jobs painted them.
Sometimes, the best thing to do with a certain type of person is sit back, keep your mouth shut, and let them bury themselves.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
and their execs are GREEDY BASTARDS.
Not that I think buying music through the iTMS is the way to go, but when you go to the movies you're still going to pay the $10 wether the movie had a budget of $5K or $50M. For the guy to make a comment like that only goes to show how greedy these guys are. They're the problem with music.
And if you haven't already come across it do check out Steve Albini's "The Problem With Music"article from thebaffler.com
how are they making less money now than with CDs/tapes? they lose all the manufacturing and overhead of a CD, and still make the same profits. BESIDES the issue of people only buying select tracks and not the stinkers, how can they complain? if ANYTHING they may lock down some things so you have to buy a whole album of songs and not the one hit.
are they trying to make even more money out of this new technology than they traditionally have from brick and mortar record/cd/tape shops? if anything they win because people can not resell these files like they do with CDs. let's face it, a lot of people that they profit from buy a song and listen to it for weeks, maybe months, and dump the CD. somebody else picks it up online or in a shop that sells used ones. they are effectively destroying that world with pay-per-download DRM'd songs. they were never able to do anything about that world before, and they have always loathed it.
Then Warner should stop free over-the-air radio broadcasts of their music. And what special kind of brain damage causes a CEO to exclaim "I want the market to decide" when he clearly means "I want to decide". We need a new tool to measure just how far up an ass a head is.
Maybe $.99 and less for songs. They are right that not all songs have the same value, so for the songs that aren't all that hot charge less. If you want to have part of the revenue stream creat a market (you can even do it from existing technology like Apple did) and sell your damb songs!
and songs 10 years old should be 25 cents.
songs 20 years old should be 12 cents.
songs 40 years old should be 1 cent.
and the RIAA/MPAA should be burning in hell.
should is a wonderful word. let's show some respect for it.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
We want to share in those revenue streams
I'm confused. Isn't sharing supposed to be bad now?
...is that they keep referring to their artists' music as "content" or "product". It just sums up their whole attitude.
So let me get this straight: now the RIAA et. al. think they have a right to Apple's iPod "revenue stream"? What a bunch of fucking vultures. If they want a piece of the hardware revenue stream, I suggest they get off their fat, lazy asses and, you know, develop some hardware.
I've spent a long time defending the RIAA's right to protect their content, etc., but it's this sort of bullshit that really makes me wonder if that time and effort hasn't been misspent. I'll tell you, these guys are the very definition of chutzpah.
Kevin
"Perhaps iPods combined with iPods are selling music as well, and it's not just a one-way street?"
How do you combine and iPod with an iPod? Do you get Super Mega Ultra iPod? Does he mean iTunes? is this guys head so far up his ass he doesn't even know what he's attacking?
"We are selling our songs through iPod, but we don't have a share of iPod's revenue," he said. "We want to share in those revenue streams. We have to get out of the mindset that our content has promotional value only."
Translated from marketese this becomes:
"Someone is making money from music, and it's not us. We don't like it. We want that money."
So, what were they saying again, that they weren't greedy?
I for one, welcome our new greedy bastards overlords.
signal_connect(0, "test_top.dut.my_sig", "clk");
The music industry is way off base -- iTMS is a distribution channel for music.
As such, Apple deserves to get a cut of the revenue; after all, they are doing the work of selling it.
If the music industry were to act as a distribution channel for iPods, maybe they could claim a right to some of the revenue.
Regarding the market setting the price for songs -- I totally agree, with one caveat: There must be a minimum amount the artist gets per download.
If the market sets the price, I'll bet we see less popular songs drop into the $0.25 range, or cheaper. And I'll bet that the market will explore the artists that cost less.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
No, actually, how dare he presume to speak for consumers? What's his idea of the market? Does he want to charge more for popular tracks, which we might reasonably assume sell in larger numbers thus naturally resulting in greater revenues for him and the artists, or does he want to charge more for less popular tracks so he has a greater chance of recouping his costs on a smaller volume? It's not at all obvious to me how "the market" would prefer differential pricing to flat pricing. On the contrary, the great advantage of flat pricing is its simplicity for the retailer and the consumer.
Some songs should be $0.99 and some songs should be more.
Hmm. How interesting that he didn't say some should be less. I agree with the idea that the market should set the prices, and that those prices will inevitably land all over the place, but he wants to define a lower bound.
I think the RIAA should pay *me* to listen to some of their crap. I know they pay other people to get me to listen to their stuff. I propose we cut out the middlemen and they just pay me directly.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
If you take a look at local retailers, I believe a good ballpark figure for the most popular single disk cd's are around 13 dollars with around 12-13 tracks. With iTunes and other online digital music distribution, there is no manufacturing, shipping, or packaging costs for the factored in to the overall price of the music. Given all this, shouldn't $.99usd be the maximum price for any single track? Personally, I agree, the music industry is being greedy. The only reason I can see as to why they don't like the current model is that they can't bundle in a bunch of crappy tracks with a good track to boost profits.
$sys$droids
"We are selling our songs through iPod"
Funny, I thought they were selling their songs through iTunes Music Store. Silly me.
Maybe some songs should be less than .99?
Somehow their concern for the artists sounds like . . . bullshit?
I'd pay more for songs if they were lossless, and perhaps included high quality album art/liner notes/lyrics?
The "firing back" seems like exactly what was said a while ago, yet this is supposedly a new article. Was something new really said by any of the recording industry, or is this just more regurgitation? Anyone have a real article? I really don't give a crap what "analysts" think.
Betrays this guy's real thoughts.
"Some songs should be $0.99 and some songs should be more."
If he was REALLY interested in letting market forces decide prices, they could be less then $.99 as well.
But you know that's not in the plans.
There is nothing wrong with variable pricing. I doubt Jobs would be against it if they wanted to sell tracks for 50 cents. The problem is when they say "Variable Pricing" what they mean is "Variable Pricing ABOVE $1".
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
What about songs that should have fallen into the public domain by now? How much should they cost?
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
Edgar Bronfman Jr thinks they deserve a share of *iPod* sales???? Is this idiot on crack or something?????
... They a$$holes are delusional. Get them down here to Florida.. Baker Act.. only takes 3 people to say lock em up...
Man, some of these a$$holes need to be locked up in insane asylums
fsck these people already!
http://malfeasance.50megs.com/
Right..."Premium" music.
you made the cd experience suck. as a result, the only cds i've bought in the *PAST FIVE YEARS* were imports from small labels. instead, i moved to itunes. you are now attempting to fuck with itunes. if you force your variable pricing scheme through, i can guarantee that i'm going to stop buying any music from you whatsoever. you are a bunch of greedy bastards, as many artists have testified, and i am sick of it.
"The market should decide, not a single retailer ..."
Did any one else laugh out loud when they read this part of the music exec's quote?
"We have to keep thinking how we are going to monetize our product for our shareholders. We are the arms supplier in the device wars between Samsung, Sony, Apple, and others." - Bronfman, Warner Music Group CEO
here's the quick version:
Apple: "You guys are greedy."
RIAA goons like Bronfman: "We're not greedy. We just want all that money Apple is making. We don't want to do any extra work or promotion. Just send us more cash."
Electric Monkey Pants
>>To have only one price point is not fair to our artists, and I dare say not appropriate to consumers. The market should decide, not a single retailer, said Mr. Bronfman. Some songs should be $0.99 and some songs should be more. I dont want to give anyone the impression that $0.99 is a thing of the past.
Um yes it is fair. See, a popular song will sell a million times, raising a million dollars. A less popular song will sell 20 times raising 20 dollars. I may not be up to speed with new math, but it seems to me one artist will get compensated more than another.
-Nuke the moon
Then bands like Hanson should sell for -$52.35 per song. Yes, the music labels should pay US to download that garbage.
Seriously though, you can't say "the market should determine the price, but we're going to put the minimum @ $0.99 and the maximum as high as we want." That's a load of crap.
I hat MacOS but go Steive Jobs. This is another reason I have not purchased a CD in the past few years.
Let the market decide the price? Well, Napster will let you have access to 1,000,000 for $10 per month. Now, it's not really far to say that $10/1,000,000 is the price, because you can't listen to that many songs in a month. An average month has roughly 44,000 minutes in it. Figure an average person will sleep through a third of that (eight of 24 hours), and (let's through the industry a bone and say that I'm a shallow teenager with no attention span) a poop -- sorry, pop -- song is 2.5 minutes long, that's about 5,849 songs that I can listen to for $10. That means each song is worth $0.0017 -- a tenth of one cent.
The free market rocks!
Wait... wait a second. He didn't say anything about being cheaper than 99 cents, did he? Crap.
The market should decide
Supply of any given song in digital form is effectively infinite, with effectively zero incremental cost. Demand is finite. By standard economic theory, this should mean that the price is zero. Somehow I don't think that was what this guy was suggesting though...
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
They want us to pay more than $.99 for a song? For this to be such a big deal to them, you know this has to mean at least a $.50 increase on songs from the biggest artists.
Now, $1.50 per song from...well, let's say 50 Cent, as he seems to be pretty big. His album ,Get Rich or Die Trying , which sells for $12.99 (correct?), has 16 songs...now, I'm assuming that some of these songs are just little sound clips. ..so let's assume this album has 12 REAL songs...so it would cost $18 to buy this song in it's digital format on iTunes (in the record industry's topsy-turvey world).... $18 for me to be able to have this $12.99 Cd on my computer? That's really crappy of them.
Earn a % of cash back from Newegg, Tiger Direct, Walmart.com, and more: http://www.mrrebates.com?refid=458505
when he owned Universal he felt that "blockbuster" movies should have higher ticket prices because they cost more to make. Needless to say the movie world ignored his stupidity also.
with my local cannabis supplier.
Me: "20 sac, fat pack, my friend"
Gardener: "Ok.. here you go, 20 bones"
Me: "There you go.. 20 flat"
Gardener: "Ughhhh.. yeah, yeah, homie, timeout. Before you go i'd like you to know that because i'm not participating in your toke sessions i'm going to have to raise the price subsequently higher on your next visit."
Me: "Wha?? What the fuck did you just say?"
Gardener: "If I can't smoke with you, i've gotta charge you 25 for a 20 sac"
Me: "Ahhhhh, nice try.. you thought I was high already man?! Haha.."
Gardener: "Haha had to try, yeah I be bullshitting, i'll be over later though, I gots 5 on it"
The only difference here is that the RIAA isn't joking. You guys seriously think Apple is going to let you smoke for free? You got paid, you made a decent profit. You're not even the cultivater of the music, the artists are. You want more? Greedy is being nice. Listen RIAA, get it through your head.. It can't last the way you're dealing. It's a fact, spend that money, fight all you want. IT CAN'T LAST.
Perhaps iPods combined with iPods are selling music as well, and it's not just a one-way street?
Er, what?
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
He made the music industry sound even MORE greedy this time around.
Maybe it's just me....
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
and the RIAA/MPAA should be burning in hell.
'I'd go over twelve percent for that!' - Nice Guy Eddie
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
When purchasing a song, you must give you name address and VISA card number. This is so that the industry can obtain what is lost when songs become popular, and of course when they become unpopular...your money is still ours.
please note: all price adjustsments should be deposited directly into mr. bronfman's personal bank account. the artists didn't do anything but make the music, bronfman is doing all the hard work.
That would only make sense if the studio then reimbursed the seller what they got from the transaction when he originally bought the music. Since the owner is simply transferring a license for which the studios (original owner) has already been compensated, the studios are not entitled to any more money from future transactions. That is the legal doctrine of First Sale.
Can't you feel it? This is the beginning of the end of the major labels. You think the indies are going to have a problem with iTunes moving tons of their songs?
/former record company dickhead.
All atrists and fans of music should be happy about this because it is the beginning of then end.
Listen to a guy who has never played a note refer to other people's music as "our content". Yeah, "your content" just like Alan Freed co-wrote "Maybelline" you jerkoff.
For Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Tom Petty, John Fogerty, and all the millions of other artists you have screwed over the last five decades... we are all drinking a beer in celebration, waiting until we can piss it out on the graves of the major labels.
The end is near. So give them enough rope!
Everyone else has commented on the WMG suit wanting a piece of MP3 player sales (which I hope is a typo or a mis-speak, it only makes sense if he ment iTunes instead). But whatever, if they don't make any money on iTunes why did they agree to the deal in the first place..
Shares of Apple were up $0.47 to $52.37 in recent trading, while shares of Warner Music Group were down a penny to $18.03.
Anyone know which journo introduced the meme that including stock quotes in a story is a good idea? It might be slightly interesting to see how moneypushers react to major news about a company, but come on... Does anyone know of a way to expedite the darwinization of a meme?
If J.K.R wrote Windows: Puteulanus fenestra mortalis!
The makers of Hot Pockets microwave snacks released a statement today regarding the price point of their snacks, and the injustice they feel the microwave industry is doing their company:
... We want to share in those revenue streams." and also continued on to say their company needs to "get out of the mindset that our food has dietary value only"
"We are cooking our food in microwaves, but we don't have a share of microwave revenue
G.E. was unavailable for comment.
Jobs shoots first in my version.
Get your Unix fortune now!
I think that title is misleading. It's like saying that "Gang Member Exchanges Fire With Police" when all he did was unload a clip of ammo into his foot.
not all songs are equal. in most of todays manifactured music , you have lots of production costs going into a select few songs and the rest of the album made up of cheaper fillers.
.so reducing the costs would further reduce any revunue coming from them....
maybe the online sales trends are such that these expensive songs sell whole lot more than the fillers (as is to be expected). thus from the cost involved in producing an album becomes harder to recover with all the songs being priced equal.
now, i am not trying to argue the merits / demerits of the new methods of song making. just trying to see why they would not just want this but might need this.
also reducing the costs of songs that sell less would probably have little or no positive impact of their sales as its not the cost but actual likability that keeps the ppl from buying them
maybe because they see this new model of music production as something that works ( the cd sales do seem to point to it), they are trying to tweak the online market to their benifit ?
'To have only one price point is not fair to our artists, and I dare say not appropriate to consumers.'
What's not fair to the artists is that if they're part of the RIAA, they don't make as much money because the RIAA hounds the profits. What's not appropriate for us, the consumers, is for the prices to be raised from the reasonable $0.99 price tag. Who is Bronfman, Jr. to speak for the consumers and artists?
Debugging? Klingons do not debug. Bugs are good for building character in the user.
The exact attitude I would expect. They truely know the cost of everything and the worth of nothing. Music is far too subjective. Now while there are different demands of different sections of the music market I find iTunes to be quite democratic for a flat pricing stucture.
Why should some one who likes some crap sub genre music pay less for a song when they derive the same pleasure from it? a 99c song (79p in the UK, too high) floats my boat and in my genre of choice, in different styles of music, people are getting the same value out of it. It's not as if there's minimum runs... varing marketing costs. Put simply they still don't have a handle on the internet as a distrobution method and quite simply in five years time they still won't...
according to this article from CNN Money, the music companies sell their music to iTMS for about $0.65 (the exact terms are probably secret), which means they are already getting about 2/3 of the revenue from each $0.99 track downloaded.
Perhaps iPods combined with iPods are selling music as well, and it's not just a one-way street?"
I don't understand this sentence.
Here's an example of a recording industry executive wishing he had added a clause in the contract that allowed for scalar revenue based off of artist popularity as it pertains to actual recordings purchased.
He seems to find fault with the $.99 scheme Apple uses, but he failed to tell us how much his company made when Apple purchased the right to use their recordings to generate revenue in the first place. If this recording executive was so concerned about 'artist compensation', he and the company he represents should have penned a better deal to make sure they would not be locked out of any potential cash flow.
All my software runs on Peniums too, I know I didn't make the first pentium but my stuff definitely helps them sell them and so I wouldn't mind sharing that stream with Intel.
WTF is their problem? If they want to make money from slinging iPods then I suggest that they start building and selling them.
The old tunes barely make anything. Why? Cause they sell less of them.
The only reason they want to charge more is because the can... However, if they raise the price of top 100 songs, I bet they will sell less. People will start looking at song #101.. or start looking for other sources. Does anyone know a good p2p software? Or how about the russian mp3 site?
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
... Like the fucking plague.
Great, I can have 'unlimited' songs now for $5-10/month, but in two years the labels will start insisting that it go up, up, up. And unlike the Apple system, your only choices are to pay the new price or lose all of your music from the last few years.
... because you shouldn't be buying DRM'ed content in the first place!
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=1905
Tristan.
In fact it's perfectly fair. Due to the nature of online content, the song only has to be produced once, and it's possible to sell an arbitrary number of copies for virtually zero cost. Therefore, the better a song sells, the more revenue it produces. Therefore, even if a good song is sold for the same amount as a miserable song, it will produce more revenue. It just got much harder to sell crappy songs because consumers there's no more way to force consumers to buy them (e.g., by bundling them with good songs). So, the $0.99 is only bad for the music industry if the majority of their songs are crap. Since that is currently the case, they want to change the pricing model.
Georg
The RIAA believes it has a right to control who listens to music they've been licensed to distribute. Every format has been prone to piracy. To control the music means controlling the media and player.
Why not dump CDs and iTMS and set up private listening booths in every town. Force the listener to undress completely (no recording devices), charge them based on demand of listening booth use, profit!!
Or or or!!
MLM-style music. Sell a given song to 5 people at $1M a pop. Let them resell to their downline of 5 people at $250K each, and the downline sells it to their downline of 5 people at $55K each, and so on. Everyone makes 10% profit (plus sales help books and conference fees)! If you catch anyone listening to the song illegally, you can enforce your property rights directly.
It's probably time that we recognize the record execs for what they are: leeches that live by sucking their wages out of the revenue stream that should really belong to the artists.
Tell you what. Let's go variable then. Songs older than 5 yrs are 50 cents. More recent non-top 100 tunes are 99 cents, and top 100 are $1.50.
per-song, that's a pretty good deal, considering bandwidth costs and whatnot... however, buying in bulk (ie- buying an album) is still a complete and total ripoff.
I was in a store (I forget which. target or walmart or something. one of those) the other day with my friend so he could get the new disturbed CD (yuck), and they had some kind of deal where a lot of the albums were about 10$. I was amazed. it's been years since I've seen popular music sold on physical CDs sold for that price.
The advantage of purchasing physical CDs is that not only do you get media that's got slightly better life than a CDR/DVDR, but you get packaging for it so you don't lose it and can easily identify it and you get some content in the packaging (like lyrics and art and whatnot).
I think iTMS and other download-based music stores should give you more when you purchase an album, whether it's giving you access to download the files again in case you lose them (like amazon does with ebooks), giving you some kind of tangible item (maybe a small CD binder with a sweet iTMS logo on it?), or something even more creative. In fact, they should have a deal on a 96 disk binder with 96 CDRs so you can burn stuff and give top spenders a discount on said product.
at least when I buy a real CD, I know that if my HD crashes or my backup DVD breaks, I can just re-rip the CD. And when another format comes along that suits my needs, I can re-rip the music to that format.
as an aside... I recently picked up the new Agoraphobic Nosebleed CD Beastial Machinery and it's got some sweet cover art. Nearly every CD I've purchased in the last couple years have come from bands and labels that seem to have some really talented artists and designers working with them (Relapse comes to mind).
The crap that IslandDefJam, Sonymusic, Columbia, and the like are pumping out is visual (and audible) feces.
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
And he thinks he can justify that he deserves money on every CD-blank sold out there and he wants to pour lead into everybody's ears so they can't listen to anything for free ever again.
Its sad really. Fetal alcohol syndrome run rampant through the boardrooms of the world. These people want to charge you for having the capacity for having nerves excited by your tympanic membrane.
Music is merely the least unpleasant noise. The wailing coming from his mouth is much higher in annoyance value.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Main Entry: griaad
Pronunciation: 'grEd
Function: noun
Inflected Forms: greed
Griaad is a desire to obtain more money or material possessions than one is considered to need. Griaad is listed as one of the Catholic Seven Deadly Sins, usually by the synonym of avarice.
Griaady individuals are often believed to be harmful to society as their motives often appear to disregard the welfare of others: if one person is to increase in wealth, somebody else must be decreasing in wealth (assuming, of course, that a market economy is a zero sum game).
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
Just because you "bought" your iPOD, don't think you have a right to use it. If they have their way, you'll license the right to listen to music on it, and pay a subscription fee, just like Sirius or XM now.
There is no reason at all that the artists need a middle man taking his cut and doing nothing but reduce their income by being stupid.
This is now no longer comical. These guys need a real reality check.
In other news: BP/Amoco says: "We're not selling any more gas until we get a cut of Toyota's profits."
Give me a break. These guys already get an enormous amount of cash just for the rights to duplicate and sell something they already paid for making.I'm not saying they shouldn't profit, but each additional sale is just more profit for them. Isn't that enough?
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Let the music industry find another online music store that's willing to sell the songs at variable prices. Then that store can compete with iTMS and the market will decide which pricing scheme is better. That's the way the market will decide, not by the suppliers forcing Apple to sell the music and different prices.
Jobs is batting a 1,000 on this one. "The music industry has done little or nothing to earn the raw profit off of iTunes sales."
The rebuttal from the industry shows how ignorant they are of the new economy structure that has been in place, for how long? 6 years.
My God people.. Wake up! It's the 21st century and you are employing your goons and torpedos in old-fashioned payola tactics and strong-arming old women for the sake of a few bucks instead of embracing the new economy.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
If I'm reading this correctly, their latest Q10 filing says the Warner Music Group is worth about $5 billion.
:) Apple has shown themselves to be very good at vertical integration. They keep what, 5 cents a song, with the record company taking like 80 cents? Why not keep that 80 cents too. Maybe they can LOWER prices. :) I can't always justify 99 cents per song when I'm looking to buy. Drop some tunes down to 49 cents and I'd spend way more. ;)
Apple has what, $8 billion in cash? Steve Jobs has said "It's all about the music". Mr. Bronfman apparently can't tell the different between the iTunes Music Store and the iPod. Who would you rather control your music?
Apple should make an example out of them and just take over the company.
The song may be in public domain, but recordings of performances of it are still protected works (ex: classical CDs).
You should be able to play those on your piano (or guitar) for free now.
Oh, you meant recordsings of somebody else playing songs??
resigned
They don't always set the profit maximizing price and that's the real interesting thing. Sometimes they set a price that's too high, where even in a monopoly situation they'd make more money by lowering it, but they don't realise that.
Part of this is because real economics isn't as simple as the little supply and demand curves we were shown in ECON 202. For anything that's an entertainment product, it does not ever exist in a complete monopoly situation. Even if you have a complete stranglehold on one kind of entertainment, people can and will substitute other forms.
That's one of the reasons the media industry is taking a hit, more people are playing video games than ever before. Well, unless you are a trust fund kid and have tons of money and no work to do, we all have limits to the amount of time and money we can and will spend on entertainment. So the more we spend on one form, the less we'll spend on another.
So, in a way, the market IS deciding, and they are deciding on less music, more videogames and price is a part of that. Raising the price is sure as hell not going to help things.
The license and system behind rights is old-fascionable and belongs about 100 years back from this date.
Change the system to comply with new techniques for distribution, it doesn't take 5 years anymore to distribute your songs, it takes 0.1 s with a 10mbit connection.
Free market is a nice word, too bad almost no one have the wisdom to implement it correctly and modify laws continuosly.
Unfair to Edgar's artists? Perhaps he should slide his dick out from "his" artists' arses before telling Apple about fairness. And note that in regard to consumers, he says "appropriate" rather than "fair", because it's a given that one tries to screw the consumers to the wall as hard as the music industry has with CDs. Jesus, what a dick.
Luke, help me take this mask off
This guy definitely is, if you read between the lines, he wants to raise the prices and wants to have a share of the ipod revenues... sheesh
Aren't CD prices roughly the same usually (I don't buy much music, so I wouldn't know)? There are some deviations from slowing demand and stuff that people don't want to listen to, but generally, especially with new stuff, your going to pay the same price for one CD from one retailer as you would another from the same retailer. And there's a well known difference here. With a CD, your paying a large amount of money probably only for a few songs in particular, compared to a set price for any song. I'm sure the artists make plenty on iTunes sales, and as for old stuff that would be hinted at being below 99 cents (but I'm sure if the record labels had there way, would stay at 99 cents while all others rose), I see nothing wrong with 99 cents for a song that might be hard to find.
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
Remember, the difference between selling by a CD vs online is little more then the cost to print/burn the CD and shipping. With a CD that only has 2 good songs, they probably make $10+ per CD, or $5 per good song people are willing to buy.
On a per song basis, they're making less, because now people don't have to buy songs they don't like. What they don't realize, is that people are using that money they save to buy more songs they like. Now that I can just buy songs that I like, I'm actually spending more on music then I did when I was buying CDs.
As a side note, all my music is legal. It was all ripped from CDs or bought off of iTMS or audiolunchbox.com. But if the music industry starts strong arming companies like apple to start selling music at a higher price, I'd be mad enough that I'd seriously consider "other means", if only to send a message. (thankfully, they can't strong arm sites like audiolunchbox)
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
He doesn't want the market to decide, he wants his organization to decide. Just like they fixed the prices of CDs oh so many years ago. I can't imagine the labels have had a sudden free-market conversion experience.
Otherwise, they'd create a free market and let the invisible hand price them down to the $.25 a song that more people would find reasonable.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
"To have only one price point is not fair to our artists, and I dare say not appropriate to consumers. The market should decide, not a single retailer ..."
I totally agree with this statement.
"Some songs should be $0.99 and some songs should be more. I don't want to give anyone the impression that $0.99 is a thing of the past."
Notice that there's no mention that some songs should be cheaper, he obviously just wants to raise prices out of greed.
I couldn't care less what happens, I think I can count on 1 hand the number of songs I've bought through iTunes(not an experience I'm likely to go through again unless I get a 10,000+ a year raise, even then, I could probably find better things to spend my money on rather than overpriced digital music. Because of the large amount, and wide variety of music I listen to, I prefer the online rental model.
the market already has decided, music is free via bittorrent at the appopriate pricepoint of 0.00$ and the artisits and music industry fully participate in the zero revenue generated this way.
It decides everytime a hundred copies of a song is purchased, opposed to a dozen. What they are really trying to say is that the market, which is their monopolistic conglomeration, should decide by consulting with... themselves.
Yeah, I started to change that to be more specific, but I figured everybody here would get my point so I went for brevity instead.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
w00t, first time that Beowulf cluster joke is in the article itself.
Since when did the music industry's price-fixing cartel know, or give a damn, about the market?
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Apple should start its own label. obviously they would need a new name for the label other then apple. But why not? OR better yet somehow create a iTunes version of the Yahoo store. Musicans would pay for a location on the apple servers and then there would be an indie artist location on the iTunes store.
OMG Ponies!!! with Glitter!!!! I miss Pink
"...Warner Music Group CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. said the price of downloaded songs should vary depending on the popularity of the songs and the artists." This is not about pricing songs according to their popularity. It's about charging more for popular songs. There is a difference. Who actually has the upper hand here? Technically the execs could pull the plug on iTunes at any moment, but doing so would alienate millions of song purchasers. That would be disasterous for their business model.
There is obviously a transition, albeit slow, at hand. I read and hear more and more often of known musicians doing their own recording and there's a growing number of indie artists doing everything from soup to nuts - meaning recording, producing and marketing their own content. I wish things would speed up. What does it take for this trend to gain momentum? How come I don't see these artist who are involved in producing and marketing their own content banding together and creating their own marketing campaigns to promote purchasing music online? A campaign in direct challenge to these goddamned douche-bag record companies crap anti-piracy/it's not fair to our artists three ring circus?
Here's what things I see needing to happen before everyone can fully give the labels the collective finger
In short. revolt, tear it all down and then all of you people out there in the industry who have an honest and useful talent step up and rebuild it. There's no reason you shouldn't continue making a living and there's every reason to rethink your business and end up making much happier customers and in turn making yourself a really nice living. To hell with fighting the existing recording industry. To hell with them, go around them. What law exists that sa
I remember going to Sam Goody at the local mall and each and every Casette Single was $2.99 if you wanted the hot new single on CD, it was $4.99, all of them. The Record Industry didn't mind that. They never argues that once a song hit #1 the single should cost $3.50, odd I think. Wait odd isn't the word, it's BULLSHIT! Yes that was the word that I was looking for. This man is full of shit. Thank you
I boycott signatures
Music is a luxury item and not something that will immediately cause the collapse of society like food, shelter and clothing. If the pricing is wrong wait them out.
Remember, impulsive cool people, waiting them out is the part of free markets you seem to have forgotten.
I note by referral your Red Herring article in which Edgar Bronfman, Jr. of Warner Music is blasting away at iTunes for one-price music.
Mr. Bronfman insisting on variable pricing for his music products is rather curious, as his labels are always pushing for higher pricing. Where they look for "variable pricing" is when they have backstock, overstock, unsolds, and budget product through Warner Special Music and some other compilation albums. And that is for stuff they are trying to get additional revenue out of long after the first rush of customers is long past.
Much of that cheaper music, in line with present industry standards, is priced for less because they strike contracts with the artists to take less for the repackaged music in hopes of getting anything at all.
Mr. Bronfman, to my view, is acting an idiot. iTunes revenue is hot and fresh, top of the register tape, for all listed songs at the present time, and his back catalog is doing very nicely indeed selling on iTunes. What he's trying to do is ratchet up the price for newly-released material, most of which frankly is vastly inferior to the back catalog, because most new acts are just rubber stamp acts with the blond standing to the left, instead of to the right.
If he wants a chunk of revenues from players, he should make them. To date, Warner Music and its forebears and assigns have not been in the hardware business. Not in the days of the wind-up phonograph, not in the days of the cassette player, not ever. They have been real happy to let others create the formats, and they just provided music to fit those formats. To stand on a soapbox and demand revenue streams from Apple hardware is rather like my demanding a share of the revenue from thieving cronies in business and government taking advantage of the kickbacks, finders fees, and so on of all that moves past my eyes on the horizon. That is not the function of business. That is the function of extortionists.
iTunes as a vendor of limited rights to play music on certain hardware devices -- and face it, folks, nobody "buys" music, they buy a copy of a format and a limited license to enjoy it within the confines of the Copyright Act -- is free as any other vendor to strike a wholesale price with any supplier and sell at retail those rights to any comers. Like, for instance, Warner Music, which "buys" physical master and resale rights, creates artistic rights for packaging materials, and distributes music performed by various artistic groups to all comers on multiple media formats. Warner is an iTunes; or, if you prefer to draw more middleman lines, Warner is a wholesale packager, selling polystyrene copies to retailers like Amazon and Best Buy, and selling electronic copies to iTunes and Napster, for retail distribution.
If Warner and the other major music labels don't like it, and don't offer their acts iTunes access, maybe the acts should take their output directly to Sirius and iTunes and Napster and perhaps even to Grokster. Grokster providing that "variable pricing" model that Mr. Bronfman so desperately wants to impose on the market.
I for one would appreciate the artists making direct releases. Felix Cavaliere, for instance, has a number of fine solo albums from the 70s and 80s that are not in commercial distribution. He should make direct release to the iTunes of the world and get residual income from his talent and organization and creativity, since Warner and Columbia have seen fit to not re-release the vinyl product on CD.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
And for my next demand, I want a law forcing all consumers to buy our products at the prices we, in our infinite wisdom, set for them. No more of this voting with your pocketbook -- or feet stuff. After all, we are vital to the American economy -- and yacht salesmen everywhere!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Yeah, jackass... remember the last time the market decided? It was called 'Napster'.
This dumbass CEO should take a paycutt, or better yet just release his artists to Apple. I'm sure the majority of his artists would prefer to make 50cent of that 99 cent than have to make what little petty amount they make now. And Consumers sure as hell wont pay over $1 a song. I know I wouldnt.
Some songs should be $0.99 and some songs should be more. ... but, I suppose, no songs should ever be LESS?
This guy seems to imply that the music industry can kill the iPod by refusing to sell through the iTunes music store. This would only be possible if the vast majority of iPods was not filled with songs from P2P serivces and ripped CDs.
It's been mentioned before, but again - the reason I like iTunes is the ability to buy individual tracks. Yes, they're a whopping 79p each in the UK and I could buy the whole album which would no doubt reduced the per track price (note to Edgar Bronfman Jr. - prices do vary, but it depends how you buy).
The thing is; I'm a happy shopper. I'm pleased with the songs I've bought and I'm much more pleased than if I had 6 or 7 album fillers shoved down my throat. In the past I've taken CDs back and got a refund for them being absolutely rubbish. So far as I know, I can't get refunds on my iTMS tracks - once they're bought that's it. How's that for a flawless revenus stream for the labels?
Now, this whole thing about varying pricing. If Edgar Bronfman Jr. really loved music, he'd not be able to pull this off because to place monetary value on something as subjective as music is virtually impossible. So I'm assuming he's coming at it from a business sense, in which case the newest releases and songs that sell the most will be "that little bit higher".
Do you know what that maks your market sound like? Drugs. And it's sad really, to think that people outside the industry obviously care a lot more than those that are in it...
BTW Edgar Bronfman Jr. - iTunes has sold 500 million songs. If you are complaining about that, you are stupid. It took a computer company to devise a successful way to sell your songs properly, I think you should thank them.
All I can say to the RIAA is I hope the last thing you see before you sizzle in hell for eternity is your entire family sexually tortured to death.
I only read part way through the comments that have been posted, but it looks like the typical Slashdot crowd that wants everything free are the one's talking. I noticed a few posts complaining that 'when you are a monopoly supplier (or a cartel) "the market" doesn't decide anything, the monopolist looks at the demand curve and sets a profit maximizing price' and the like. Those expressing such opinions are missing two important points:
1) There's more to "the market" than markets for identical commodities available from multiple suppliers. A monopolist that sets a profit maximizing price based on demand but doesn't use non-market forces like government regulation or subsidies is still operating in the market. Especially with non-essential items like songs, consumers have a lot of influence on prices--at least if the sellers have a clue about how to maximize their profits.
2) A monopoly on one song is not a monopoly on music. If Sting's latest songs cost $2.50 each, but U2's are going for $0.99, U2 is going to take some money away from Sting. This might prompt Sting (or whoever sets the prices for his songs) to lower their price. Hey, market forces just resulted in a price adjustment!
I have to say I agree with at least part of what Bronfman said--selling different songs for different prices is an appropriate market move. Of course, if his statement about wanting part of the iPod pie meant anything but that he felt that Apple was getting an unfair share of the benefit of the whole deal (because selling songs at below market prices helps them sell more iPods--which is probably a fair assessment), then I definitely disagree with him there.
Convert RSS to HTML - integrate webfeeds into your website
"labels" are a bunch of suits doing payola and drugola, with a few artist and repitoire folks finding acts and working with them in the studio. apple doesn't need that at all. they are doing just fine as a retail seller of music copies with limited rights to play said music on certain physical equipment. and they are doing fookin' gangbusters, Katie bar the door, selling certain physical equipment that is compatible with iTunes.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Honestly, claiming that is like claiming that music is not sharing the profits from the new oil prices, and that $.20 a gallon should go to the RIAA. The iPod is a consumer device, music is music. I am a small recording artist with two albums that are available to purchase (not through the RIAA you can be sure), I want people to buy my music, not steal it, but I think that if you are lucky enough to be on iTunes, thank the extra revenue. If iTunes prices raise, you lose business. I buy music on iTunes. If their prices go up, I will stop, but I won't buy albums again, I'll just go back to stealing it. Record companies should see iTunes as the godsend it is, the only thing keeping internet music listeners off kazaa and bittorrent and buying legally.
huh? say again?
Let the market decide. Right now, the iTunes store is pretty much the only game in town. Let the other "retailers" price product at prices that they see fit, and let us see what kind of pricing the market will bear.
What the music industry is pissed off about is that they keep getting "scooped" by the tech-savvy: First, it was taping and burning CDs, then Napster clones, now iTunes.
Q: When is the music industry going to "innovate" its own digital music business model?
A: Never. The people who run it are incapable of producing anything of real value themselves. What they are adept at is tying up other peoples IP through creative legal manuevering. All the record companies are really capable of is hiring lawyers to intimidate and coerce artists (and, now, customers!) to play the game by the rules that they themselves created!
Guess what? Soon, new artists will have little or no incentive to release their IP through established music-retailing businesses, period. Already, consumers have little or no incentive to purchase product through members of the RIAA.
This has already been going on for several years, and nothing the RIAA is doing is going to help that situation.
The big problem in the industry is that they simply aren't making the money they want to be. Sure, they are making more money than last year, but they still want more (wouldn't you?). They feel that their projections of what they should be making are too far above what they are making.
/. for quite a while now and I love how it always gets brought up that they should lower prices for things that you want. Why? Are we getting more ripped off than we were before? No. I say leave it at .99 and don't lower it. I'd even suggest to raise it except that it would not be cost effective for the consumer to use the service anymore.
I don't think that raising the price of music is going to solve the problem. I mean 1.99 is a huge price for a song. It's hitting a point where it will be cheaper to just go out and buy an album. I mean, look at any hit compilation album (think Big Shiny *). Around 17 of the greatest tracks that year. Am I going to pay $34+ for the songs individually, or will I just wait until the compilation album comes out and get it for $20.
The music industry continually drops the ball, and they really need to stop, look and listen to what's going on. Not making enough money? Maybe it's because the industry is too saturated. Maybe it's because musicians are just people like the rest of us and we are figuring that out. Name a new band that you would freak out for if they came to your home town? Sure, you'd go to a concert, we all would. But are you going because you have to wait to meet the lead singer or because you like the bands music?
I know this is kind of a tangent, but we are way too focused on the pop-icons of our day. It's JUST music. Sure, I listen to it all the time, but I don't have a favourite band. The same should go with actors, athletes, and anything else like that. They are just people. Just because Avril Lavigne has a good voice, she's better than me? No!
I've been reading
Pull out your wallets and stop being so cheap. Nothing is really worth the price you pay for it, so in effect everything is worth the price you pay for it. Get over it and go buy the damn song.
To have only one price point is not fair to our artists
Except that the recording industry has proven time and time again that they couldn't give a damn about the artists. As far as I'm aware, not a single artist has ever seen any money from the RIAA suing customers over "piracy" (even though they did it "for the artists"). And they even frequently ignore the wishes of the artists - like Fiona Apple's "Extraordinary Machine" CD they refused to publish, the recent CD with copy protection that the artists themselves disagree with and started telling their fans how to crack, and refusing to allow music to be sold in online stores even though the artists themselves wanted it.
The recording industry is only in it to maximize profits for themselves. They have never demonstrated otherwise.
suppliers have every right to set the wholesale prices for their products. however, how the music industry has and is conducting itself is just pathetic; and if apple had a CHOICE in who to purchase their tracks from, i'm sure they'd be looking at alternatives.
as i understand it, there's a contract up for renewal between apple and the music industry? this would just be posturing during the negotiations. normally the public isn't exposed to the bickering, lies and pissing matches between a retail outlet and their suppliers during the purchasing process.
if apple knows what's good for it's customers, they'll push for wholesale rates that allow them to maintain the current retail price. if the music industry knows what's good for itself, it'll LOWER their wholesale prices..
the more expensive something is: the more likely it is to be stolen or pirated. and the fewer units will be sold. the industry's goal is to jack prices as high as they can, so long as gross receipts doesn't drop due to lowered sales volume. and if they can get away with locking the content down so tight you need an riaa exec's thumbprint to play a tune, so much the better for the them (riaa).
the less expensive something is: the more likely it will be bought and paid for, and as a result, pirated or stolen less. lower prices equal higher sales volumes, which can mean higher gross receipts. likewise, the more convenient and desirable a product is, the higher the sales volume will be.
the music industry wants to (and does) charge the highest possible price for music, even though that lowers demand and sales volume (why don't any of the riaa sob stories about lowered sales due to p2p mention the HIGHER prices for music during the same time period?). they could instead work to find the LOWEST price that generates the same (or even more) revenue due to an increase in sales volume at the lower price. (actually any industry could do this.. but many choose not to)... noting that the LOWER price translates to better overall p.r., and happier customers who will be more apt to be repeat and/or higher volume customers
and lastly, the crappier the music is: the less likely anyone will even bother pirating it, nevermind buying it. HMMM.. i think i just figured out why current music SUCKS... they're forcing the crap on us to discourage piracy.. tricky little buggers....
Ipod is a product that makes revenue, in which the music industry has no share.
The tracks sold to run on Ipod have are also a product that has a market value - if priced reasonably, this will be somewhere in the region of $0.10 - $0.30. Any higher price point will lead to people duplicating the tracks in violation of current copyright laws - something that I would personally support, although I have not personal interest in the inferior product of today's record industry.
I think the problem for the record industry arises in that they are no longer relevant, since artists no longer need them to distribute their material, hence all this convoulted nonsense about sharing in revenue streams.
"We want to share in those revenue streams. We have to get out of the mindset that our content has promotional value only" OK, then, start releasing music with more than "promotional value". To quote Col. Bruce Hampton, "The best thing about popular music is that it isn't popular for long." Take Care - ZC
When I was a kid, I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realized that the Lord, in his wisdom, didn't wor
Most people would buy those albums that are $15, only wanting one or two songs of the 15, now that iTunes allows people to pick those songs that they want, it may motivate artists to make better music, and not make those extra 14 'filler' songs in the albums. :)
Those 60's and 70's tracks are the big earners. Go look at how much a copy of pink floyd's The Wall is, and think how long ago it recouped any costs. Or examine how much it costs to download anything by Abba onto your phone as a ringtone. Now, a lot has (thankfully) fallen by the wayside, but the stuff that survived is so very, very profitable.
This is different from games ($5 bargain basement within 3 years), even most DVDs. The record companies love their back catalogue, and dont want to let go. This is why they have been pushing for longer copyrights on live recordings across the EU and US.
>Try to find iPods siginficantly below Apple's MSRP...
Price fixing? Not really. Most retailers charge what they do because there's not much margin on iPods.
For example, PCConnection sells a 512K shuffle for 94 bucks, or $5 under Apple's retail. A few months ago, I asked my rep at PCConnection give me a quote on 500 shuffles for a project for a client. We've done business with him for a long time, so his response was to tell me his cost and ask me what I needed the price to be. In the end, I got a pretty good deal, but the fact was there simply wasn't much room to go a lot lower.
That wasn't a typo, son. That was an example of typical Execu-speak in the Bush Era. It's their way of showing off how arrogant they are; the subtext is "I'm so privileged I don't have to put any effort into making sense or remembering words or grammar. I'm entitled to everything I want."
I, for one, welcome our new Antichrist overlord.
Doesn't this prove Steve's point that the records industry is getting greedy?
Longer songs should cost more because they have more bits :)
Serious, I want to pay by the Kilobyte. Lossless can cost more than 96kbps mp3. That's the kind of variable pricing I'm willing to pay for.
I think allofmp3 really had the right idea.
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
The market has decided that they want to make $0.99 the price they will pay for their music. They could even go cheaper through WalMart, Yahoo, etc, but they have decided not to. If they decide to make more popular songs more expensive, I'd imagine that would shift a lot of demand to the lower priced songs on iTunes, or to the other lower priced providers, which would still provide an average revenue of $0.99/song, the only difference being the new Christina Spears song will not sell as well.
It's rather interesting that the music industry is going after itunes for their $.99 pricing but isn't going after Wal-Mart, which only charges $.88 a song. It seems that they don't want to upset Wal-Mart, which bring in more retail sales than any other business. At the same time, however, it's odd, considering that the music industry is taking an even smaller profit with the walmart store.
songs over 14 years should be public domain
Make your own music. Buy a harmonica,guitar or some other instrument at a local pawn shop for less than the price 2 or 3 CD's.
Read a good library book instead of buying or downloading a movie.
There's nothing magic about that crap they try to jam down our throats.
It seems to me that if they truly wish to let the market decide pricing through supply & demand, the average price would be a lot less than $0.99. Though I'm sure that's not what he means will be "better" for the artists and consumers.
We're not arguing against the free market. In fact, we're arguing in favor of more of it. We want the market to determine the real costs of various things without the government creating artificial monopolies by legislative fiat such as DMCA or even various copyright extensions through the years.
Copyrights and their abuse by the media industry are no different than any of the traditional right wing darlings. We can deregulate railroads, trucking, airlines, natural gas and even electrical companies for the benefit of the economy, and we can certainly deregulate intellectual property as well.
So long as your argument is that "It's the law", or, "government regulation is needed", then, you are not being free market. Think about copyrights and intellectual property in that sense, rather than instinctively siding with the businesses and you'll see that in many ways the Linux crowd is far more in favor of free markets than any media company or Microsoft will ever be.
Linux is not asking for government protection, Microsoft is, Sony is, the recording industry is, and that's all you really need to know about whose a socialist and whose not.
Bill Gates is a socialist, not Linus Torvalds.
This is my sig.
The music industry, or at least some people in it still do not get that supply and demand does not apply in an online economy. The idea of supply and demand means a product is more expensive because it's less available due to the fact that a lot of people are buying the product being sold.
However in an online environment the product is virtual and therefore cannot be less available, because there is no physical product to be out of stock. The only price is bandwidth. The idea that they should be in charge more for songs based on an old business model that doesn't apply in the Internet does not make sense.
while the music industry is now going into a 'singles' only economy. That's the way was back in the 50s and 60s, and they managed to survive then. And they can do it now, or they can find better artists that people want to buy full albums of.
Sadly the only place I buy a CD is Target. I don't buy many (maybe 10 a year) due to the paucity of music that I like. Lately there has been a lot of metal albums available for around $11. I bought the newer Mastadon and Dillinger Escape Plan at Target and felt good about it. Plus it was kind of surreal to see a DES video playing on in-store video system. That was definately not the typical Top-40 fare that most of the teeny boppers and soccer moms are used to. ps:Agoraphobic Nosebleed...nice. I'm more of a "Honkey Reduction" guy but I will check out Beastial Machinery.
A lot of people are griping that this exec only sees a need for pricing above $0.99.
People, read the news!
"That's not to say we want to raise prices across the board or that we don't believe in a 99-cent price point for most music," he said. "But there are some songs for which consumers would be willing to pay more. And some we'd be willing to sell for less."
I think the $0.99 model for any song is stupid, because it doesn't reflect the value of the song. Some songs should sell for $0.01 and some should sell for $10.00.
He's also forgetting that once there's a disincentive to downloading popular songs, they're going to get downloaded less, and since the music charts themselves are based on the quantities purchased, the top songs will fall down the charts and into a lower price bracket, thus simultaneously making the charts meaningless and ensuring that the music industry won't actually realize the extra profit this move was supposed to give them. Brilliant.
For all the bitching out there it seams there are very few who are doing something about it. Until the artists come together and produce a distribution solution to compete with I-Tunes you will still have large companies dictating behavior. The closest thing I have seen is CDbaby but even then you have a centralized distribution point relying upon outdated media. Somebody please hand the independent artists an open source DRM solution that is easy to manage. As I-Tunes proves DRM does not even need to be that secure to keep the general population from redistributing the songs. Once there is a free semi secure method of distributing songs the only thing musicians will need large media companies for is advertising (honestly anyone with $5-10K can start their own personal studio).
"I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions."
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Lets see they produce music but want cut of hardware sales? Can we say lik eShakespear.. Stick where the sun do not shine?
Fred Grott(aka shareme) http://mobilebytes.wordpress.com
"There's no content that I know of that does not have variable pricing,"
Except for music/movie rentals and movie theater tickets. Are they going to start telling blockbuster that each rental CD should be individually priced?
We want to share in those revenue streams
I'm sorry but how is that not greedy?
And as a consumer I think $.99 for every song is MUCH better than a variable pricing scheme. I can buy any song knowing it's only going to cost me a buck and don't have to worry about that random $3 song that I otherwise would not have bought.
Erik http://yakko.cs.wmich.edu/~rattles
"and I dare say not appropriate to consumers" ????
If this guy thinks that songs should be sold for more than $0.99, then he should go ahead and do so. I mean, really, go ahead and start selling songs for more than that and see how that works out. He is perfectly free to set up his own online music store, and because of the extreme flexibility of the technology involved, this will just involve getting the files on to your portable music player from a URL instead of from the iTunes application.
Once he has done this he can set the songs in his music store to cost $1.99 or $5.00 or $53.00 or absolutely whatever price he likes, and if people choose to buy it then all of that money will go right to him. While of course meanwhile the iTunes Music Store will still be back there offering quality music at $0.99 a song.
Then the market will decide for itself. That's what he says he wants, right?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
..goodbye topham.. I hope you don't see it comming.
/sniffle
Smile.
The way you tell it
the new ipod earphones
will be phalic shapped. Hahaha
..
oh wait..
Smile.
That's right, kids. Head out to K-mart as fast as you can and pick up your very own SUPER BRONFMAN action figure!
..... .....
Watch as he sells off Seagram's 20% stake in DuPont, a stable chemical company with endless quantities of valuable patents and products, to buy MEDIA ASSETS!
Play along as he sells off the Bronfman family's holdings of Seagram, the foundation upon which his grandfather built the family's billions of dollars in assets!
Stare mystified as SUPER BRONFMAN takes all of the money from the Seagram sale and puts it in the hands of Jean-Marie Messier, head of Vivendi... a bottled water company that got into the entertainment business... !
Cringe as Vivendi is taken to the brink of bankruptcy and the Bronfman family loses billions!
Be left speechless as SUPER BRONFMAN, after failing to buy Universal from the tattered remains of Vivendi, settles for Warner Music........ purveyors of such fine musical talent as Kid Rock and Madonna........
Act now!
CONFIRMED!!
(By that I'm referring to Steve Jobs' "greedy" comment about the music industry)
"Won't somebody please think of the AAAARTISTS?"
Why do you think it is written "iPOD"? It isn't.
I wonder what this "music mogul" thinks of compulsory licensing and statutory license fees (http://www.soundexchange.com/rates.html) and Harry Fox and the averaged/staticstical licensing model employed by ASCAP and (afaik) BMI, and 1000 other circumstances in which averaged pricing for content is used.
$0.99 per song is an average price, and comprehends both Top 40 and Bottom 100,000. The music industry simply wants to get this average price in addition to a premium on the Top 40 stuff that's already rolled into the average. If they want to re-negotiate the average price, that would be "reasonable" (in music industry terms, anyway), but this is blatant double-dipping.
Jobs is right: they're being greedy.
Anyone ever notice that if you really look at it, when you buy iTunes music you are really buying an inferior product? $.99 is actually a little too high in my opinion considering the best quality you can buy is 128kbps AAC. Why not 192 or 320? Why not goto the Allofmp3.com model where you pay 1 cent per megabyte and you can encode in any format you want? That is the best model, I think.
Our comrades buy from allofmp3.com; where music is priced by the pound in Ogg.
Eddy Jr. may not realize it, but his position is fundamentally anti-capitalist. Goods are priced based both on their value to the buyer, and on their production cost.
Particularly for things like movies and music, where the cost to add another viewer is nearly zero, the price is entirely based on the perceived value. It has virtually nothing to do with how much it cost to make.
I think the flat price has the great advantage of making me think not about saving a couple of bucks, but of which movie I really want to see. If prices were different, I would feel cheap going to a cheap movie, or wasteful going to an expensive one, or wonder what my date will think ...
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
I think the music industry's problem is that the market has decided, and it's decided it doesn't like the music industry's standard terms. The music industry doesn't like that decision and is trying everything they can including whining like a spoiled brat to get it changed. Unfortunately for them, the market isn't buying it (in several senses).
Man, what happened? There I was reading slashdot, then everything went black and all I could hear was "I WANT I WANT I WANT ME ME ME ME GIMME MONEY NOW". Wait. Did someone post an article about the DMCA, or a quote from a music exec?
and it seems the record cos don't like it.
If you wan't to buy music from the itunes music service and play it on a portable device without working around or cracking the drm and transcoding the music you have to buy an ipod.
If you wan't to sell music to ipod users online you either have to make it non DRM (some indy labels might do this but i doubt any of the big record companies would) or sell it through the itunes music service.
its this two fanged approach that is going to make the ipod and itunes music service very very tough to beat. I don't think this is a good thing from the point of view of either customers or the music industry.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Economist claim to maximize profits a company should charge where maginal cost is equal to the price. In that case they should be giving away all their music for free. But then again there isn't competition.
excellent point.
in fact, 14 years is too long in this "information age".
what songs 14 years ago would you still purchase today with the same enthusiasm as when it first came out?
5 years is plenty of time to make enormous profits. even more so for software which obsoletes much more quickly than other copyrighted items. seeing iD software release the source for quake3 recently... it was 5 years old...
now imagine if every game after 5 years on retail shelves (or virtual ones) would release their source AND the art/game assets. i MORE than DOUBT any piece of software would be even remotely as profitable in its 5th year of sale. most studies and anecdotal evidence suggests that movies/music/games/books sell the most copies in their first year.
5 years is 1825 days. that's an enormous amount of time to make a !healthy! profit. 90 years + the life of the author (sounds like an incentive to murder the authors...) is tantamount to infringement itself. it's so beyond absurd that i lack the words to properly express my feelings about it.
5 years.
or you can take what's behind door number 2:
a complete dismissal and voiding of the copyright system.
sane laws vs no copyright laws whatsoever.
the way things are going right now... it won't last. people more and more everyday are starting to become aware of just what kind of shit copyright laws we have.
oh and no DMCA or alikes.
if you want the protection of copyright laws, you cannot in any way use technical means to lock customers out of their purchases.
it's one or the other.
you can have DMCA and DRM/Insidious Computing but you then forfeit your copyright PRIVILEGES.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
"I don't think so. Why should they deserve a share of iPod sales?"
He's saying Jobs likes the $0.99 price point because it fules iPod sales, which is Jobs' primary interest. But the music companies get nothing from iPod sales, so they want more money from selling popular songs. Jobs is just as greedy, but better at hiding it.
Vote for Pedro
If he just wants "variety" in price and for consumers to set the price based on what they are willing to pay, then why didn't he suggest that some songs should cost less?
I'm gonna need a spec.
Some songs should be $0.99 and some songs should be more.
I say some songs should be free.
I shot the sheriff
Some songs should be $0.99 and some songs should be more. I don't want to give anyone the impression that $0.99 is a thing of the past ... We are selling our songs through iPod, but we don't have a share of iPod's revenue
So yeah. It will never be cheaper than 99 cents. We don't want to give people that 99 cents is a thing of the past, but we want a piece of the pie, and 99 cents isn't doing it.
Real bright there guy. You suck.
Tell you what. Let's go variable then. Songs older than 5 yrs are 50 cents. More recent non-top 100 tunes are 99 cents, and top 100 are $1.50.
He seems to be forgetting that there used to be variable pricing with movies. Used to be that movie A would cost you $4, but movie B would cost $6. They went with standard pricing nation-wide when they noticed that nobody was going to the more expensive movies, probably because they were more expensive.... (bear in mind that this is Hollywood, which utterly refuses to admit that maybe the reason they're losing money is because they overpay mediocre actors to produce crappy movies)
So they decided that variable pricing on an entertainment commodity, particularly one as generic as movies or music, is a bad idea, because it just means that a significant proportion of people just don't really care that much what entertains them, as long as it's entertaining, and will quite happily buy whatever's cheapest.
Of course, that all hinges on it being a commodity that actually entertains. Personally, I think that given the dreck that gets passed off by the RIAA and its counterparts these days as "entertainment", $0.99 is overpriced. $0.09 would be overpriced. Hell, they couldn't pay me enough to download the latest crap from Britney Spears and her ilk.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
The record labels want a percentage of iPod hardware sales? You can put a lot of things on an iPod besides record label-licensed music. They get money when their particular songs are bought, not from the hardware itself.
I wonder if in their mind they really see themselves as having the only content worth putting on an iPod.
since I read an "All your base are belong to us."
And it actually seems apt in this case.
I'm gonna need a spec.
-AT
Working in a DevOps shop is like playing in a band made up entirely of keytarists.
He's overqualified. ;)
Those comments just _SHOWS_ that they are indeed greedy. The fact that they want a cut out of _everything_ shows what kind of bastards they are. We need new "record" companies that don't give a damn about CDs, high prices, unfair payment (bling bling to a few choice artists and the rest gets the shaft), and simply sell music on the net. Maybe we could start getting some _quality_ music going again...
Now that vendor has figured out how much power they have, as a monopoly, and I'm supposed to feel sorry for the "poor" media companies who set up such an inefficient market in the first place?
I couldn't care less.
Interesting. While I suppose some would argue that the music industry is ever "fair" to artists, even Bronfman doesn't seem willing to suggest that the music industry is "fair" to customers.
"Appropriate" isn't how you treat customers; it's how you manage a resource, like a school of fish or a flock of sheep. Interesting to hear that difference in a single sentence.
Who rated this informative?
Partial Credit: The Engineer's Best friend
"Well, the bridge didn't fall all the way down!"
So one license fee based on the business model of the business performing and that grants license to all ASCAP material regardless of popularity of songs, artist, etc. One of their organizations business models. They really are greedy and want ot renegotiate the deals already in place that looked so good when Napster was their nightmare and iTunes their salvation.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
what songs 14 years ago would you still purchase today with the same enthusiasm as when it first came out?
:)
I know I'm not adding to the discussion much with this post, but I thought it might be fun to answer this question. Today I bought a new (the used ones were book-less) copy of Spin Doctors - Pocket Full of Kryptonite. This album should have gone into the public domain about a month ago. (It was first published 14 years and some 28-odd days ago).
Yeah yeah, I'm a whore of early 90s pop culture...
Downmix - The Artscene News Source!
The guy says, its not fair to the artists to have all music be the same price, implying that some "Artists" have move valuable music. What about this, if he is concerned about the artists, then it doesnt apply to dead ones, since they aren't being reimbursed anyway. And he is right, any on of Rachmaninov's concertos is better than any pop song in the past 20 years, why not charge more for his music since its obviously more valuable? Jobs, as much as I hate him, is right. .99 is a very appropriate price point, and is just about what songs cost off the shelf anyways.
"There's no content that I know of that does not have variable pricing," said Mr. Bronfman at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia investor conference.
Really? Then how come every movie in the theater costs the same? The only variable is discount theaters and "matinee" pricing. Still, the price doesn't vary based on the content but rather time. Garbage like Gigli and Glitter cost the same at the theater as blockbusters like Spider Man, Star Wars and Harry Potter. Where's the variable pricing there?
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Some sould sell for less than 99 cents.
You could even make the arguement that some should have a negative price.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
umm is it just me or does the RIAA and members of it just pull shit outta their ass and spit it out of their mouths?
(yes i know i suck at spelling fell free to correct my grammar and/or spellin i dont care, im still not going to change
"Some songs should be $0.99 and some songs should be more."
He forgot "and some songs should be less". That is, if he really wants to let the market decide.
Jobs was right, the industry is greedy.
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Yes - And do you notice how he seems to always state "You should charge more for..." rather than "You should charge less for...".
Record companies get a huge slice of the royalties generated from the sales of their artists work (in fact they get the majority of it). It's about time the artists got money and the record companies didn't.
dnuof eruc rof aixelsid
The music industry is largely superfluous at this point, but unfortunately they haven't realized that yet. Unfortunately, they won't go down without a fight, and since they have made such an obscene amount of money over the years, they have the cash reserves to wage quite a war.
Vote with your dollars, go see live music. Go see that local band that has been playing at the corner bar for years. Find someone who seeks out music outside the mainstream and have them make you a mix. There is so much more out there than reaches the top 100. As digital distribution expands we will have more access to what we want, not what we are being force fed. Turn off MTV, it is the industry.
'The words of the prophet are written on studio walls'
I remember so many on /. saying how we have to support iTMS when it first came out. The argument was that we should appease the labels and stop downloading songs illegaly so they would continue to offer their songs on iTMS. Well we've done just that and look where it got us.
Now that iTMS had grown, the greedy bastards want to raise prices and get a piece of iPod sales revenue. iTMS is a victim of its own success. One could say they only agreed to sell songs for 99 cents in the first place because they were in a panic. Their sales were in the toilet and Kazaa was king. We agreed to pay 99 cents, but all it did was whet their appetite.
Appeasment doesn't work, people! They refuse to abandon their antiquated business model and their greed knows no limit. Appeasement didn't work with Hitler either. We gave him Czechoslovakia, so he wanted Poland too. We need to bring these RIAA assholes to their knees all over again. We've done it before.
Long live LimeWire and BitTorrent.
Didn't the market already decide digital music should be free?
Just sayin...
Actually, most of the music I've been buying recently is pushing 25 years old. I've been very enthusiastic about buying it. :)
it may be time to start killing these people off.
"WAAH! WAAH! I'm not making enough money off the loser public, so I wanna charge more! I need a new yacht! WAAH! WAAH!"
Note he says some should be $.99 and some should be more. He makes no mention that some should be less--because many should be. In fact I'd say at least 90% of the songs released in the last 10 years are worth about a dime, total, for all of 'em.
I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that you're an idiot!
first of all, $1 is the absolute maximum i am willing to pay for a lossy digital music file. at that price, i am even reluctan to buy files with DRM. there are pleny of digital music services that sell unladen mp3s, and a few that are selling them in FLAC for a bit more.
second of all, this guy is an idiot. "selling music through iPod; we should get a share". if he means "selling music through iTunes music store", they already ARE getting a share. and in some places, they are also getting a share of the profits on digital audio players. (and blank CD, and cassettes, that may or may not be used for copying copyrighted materials).
So what if the music industry folds? Does that mean no one will ever sing a song again? Will the world be silenced forever? Will Beethoven, Mozart, et al roll over in their graves because there is no more music industry? I would like for people like Bronfman to explain in very detailed terms what value they bring in the 21st century to the music making process? My guess it is a very marginal addition.
I have over 5,000 cds and a couple thousand Lps. If there was never another CD produced, I still have enough music to last me a lifetime. Additionally, because of advances in computer tech, I can now produce my own music which I do for my own amusement. It may not appeal to anyone else but I get enormous satisfaction from doing it myself. Again, what do I need the music industry for?
I say let the music industry perish. Out of its ashes, a new phoenix will rise that will be a lot more interesting and compelling. Dollars will flow to those that embrace a modern paradigm.
"The consumer only has one choice: buy it, or don't buy it. In a real free market economy the consumer has a third, more powerful option, to find a cheaper supplier."
Free market is not the same as anarchy. In a free market theft of products is not considered a viable option. So why should someone who has put no effort in developing a song be allowed to sell it simply because it's easy to copy? In a free market you're expected to sell your own work, not leech off of others without their permission.
Vote for Pedro
You know what the problem is? The RIAAs look at the buttload of not-very-wise teenagers out there willing to spend 2.99 for a ringtone, but only 99 cents for a whole song and somehow they feel slighted even though that's practically a free sale because they didn't have to spend a penny in production or distribution! Some people just *don't* *understand* the Internet, and that's why capitalistic natural selection will doom them.
P.S. I don't mind people talking on their cellphones in public NEARLY as much as their insipid self-defining ring tones. If I hear that Harry Potter theme one more time at the airport I'm going to THROTTLE someone, AND I LIKE HARRY POTTER!
P.P.S. It is my opinion that the RIAAs deserve *nothing* from the iPod sales because that was Apple's compensation in the deal. Jobs took all the risk pricing the songs at 99 cents because Apple doesn't do much better that breaking even after the RIAAs get their cut.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Let's say I download 1000 songs my first month (all my favorites) and 100 songs per month (roughly 10 cds) thereafter, at $10/month. What is the lifetime cost of a song downloaded in the first month over the course of a year? Two years? Five years? Ten years? How many months before that song downloaded in the first month is the cost of an iTune?
.008...
... + p(12) and so on...
p(n) = Price per song per month at month n = 1 / (100 + 25(n-1)) -> p(1) = 0.01, p(2) =
One year cost is p(1) + p(2) + p(3) +
So, a quick little bit of code tells me that one of those original songs has cost:
One year: 0.076
Two year: 0.122
Five year: 0.197
Ten year: 0.260
Also, it takes 189,418 months until it's 99 cents... which is quite a while. I guess my point is, it's a pretty good deal*
*Though it's pretty obvious that the only reason these companies have these prices is because iTunes is kicking their ass, and this is the only way they can turn heads. There's no way they'll keep these prices forever. Plus the DRM they use to 'protect' these songs is as draconian as it gets. Plus they don't work with iPods. All the same, it's hard to imagine that iTunes could raise prices with these guys practically giving music away...
No, I didn't RTFA. I RTFC'd. Lots of them. And judging from what I saw I see gross misunderstanding on both sides. So why doesn't everyone stop screaming for just a minute. Thanks. Oh, and because I'm really lazy and don't want to have to make two seperate points, I'm going to roll them together into one, where its likely that the sarcasm subchannel will actually have the higher signal-to-noise ratio, so you had better pay attention.
...
In this corner, the Challenger, the world's most popular onlline music store. Having sold 500 million songs since inception, having managed by focused training and blind luck to create the largest, most-scalable distribution mechanism with the highest name-brand recognition, they now seek to dictate terms on the pricing of individual goods; They contest that their one price fits all is a good and just system for the reward of investment to the Champion.
In the opposite corner, the Champion,
anyways, you get the point. Its like Borges, if I imagine a really great book, and then tell you about it as though it existed, then it does for our purposes, doesn't it?
the deal is this; the music industry has traditionally disitributed its product as a package deal. that is, you get the hits and the b-sides, and you get a stew of both for X dollars. now, steve jobs wants you to pay X/10. whats the problem? the problem is that you're probably not going to buy the b-sides, and forget about the rest of the songs on the album. but the music industry can't scale down to an individual song level, because there are too many costs associated with the production, that they would have to be incurred for every song. think about it.
just in case you're wondering i'm not an industry apologist, far from it. personally i'm surprised no one has posted a link to the famous Steve Albini commentary on the industry. so i will, its here,.
but there was a really intersting piece i read the other day about a guy who had bought 20k worth of high-end digital gear because he wanted access to his jukebox in every room. and the only way that was going to happen was if he used an adapter of some kind - what do you call those things for iPods?
i hope you see the point; its that Steve Jobs isn't freeing you from anything, he's only grabbing as much power as he can right now because he can. he doesn't care about good or just or fair or anything. ask Woz about the $1000.
the only way this goes forward the right way, is that we decide to reward people who decide to move outside of this system to make a living. they release stuff for free and ask for PayPal donations if you like their stuff. and you know what, if everyone who listened to a song more than 3 times paid for it, they would have a decent livelihood and probably be a lot happier about the way things worked. all except for the napoleons of the world. yeah, you know who i mean, the ego-possessed, i want a gold toilet for the guest bedroom crowd. they and mr bronfman, that is.
...vividly encapsulates that post-Watergate/pre-punk/coked-up moment when you could trust no one, least of all yourself.
and I thank you for that
uR iGn0ranc3, Their Power
Variable pricing may be a good thing. "Some songs should cost 99 cents, and some should cost more" - and some should cost LESS. Given this impetus we might see a price war blow up.
A CD is plastic, right? As the price of oil has been sky rocketing ever since CD's were introduced, CD's have stayed the same price, even in the face of increasing inflation of the economy in general. It must cost manufacturers upwards of 15 - 20 times more to manufacture a CD than it used to cost them. So, I mean, what's 20 times 1/20th of a cent...? OK, so it now costs them a penny a piece to manufacture CDs, but they haven't increased the cost to the consumer from $16 to $320. Man, these executive record guys are selling these things at practically a loss, now, just to keep us entertained. And they are still paying the artists and engineers somehow.
The Admin and the Engineer
Yes, they are confused and/or want another way to say "We want songs sond with iTunes to be $2.49 each with the encoding dropped down to 96kbps at 40Hz"
Many flaws in their "logic". Having an iPod and running iTunes doesn't mean you're buying from the iTunes store. Buying from the iTunes store doesn't mean you have an iPod. I have an iPod and use iTunes, I havn't had much luck with the Winamp plugin. I buy the little music I have in the form of used CDs and rip them at 320kbps. I know people use buy from the iTunes store then rip the tracks for use with their simple $10 mp3 player or just play on their PC, nothin wrong with a laptop and headphones. I guess they don't want to realize that not all iPods are used to play content owned by their company. The iPod also plays music from independent bands and podcasts and prerecorded class lecture info, think the Duke iPod project, and be used as and external hdd. They may be trying the Canadian levy/tax/whatever approach. Since the device could possibly be used to hold their content, which was legally obtained, they should be awarded a share of the profits even though they had nothing to do with the design manufacture or sale of the device. Those damn greedy RITA* bastards.
*RITA=Recording Industry Trust of America
(nothing to do with the hurricane, I've been using it since before the storm existed)
F7 doesn't work, ignore spelling and grammar
sounds a tad greedy to me, but that just my opinion...
(damn i could barely make out the anti-bot word, are you rasing the bar for posting or sumthin')
Math according to the record companies:
iPod Shuffle (1 GB) - $129
Music for the Shuffle - $240
iPod Nano (2GB) - $249
Music for Nano - $1000
iPod (20GB) - $299
Music for iPod - $5000
iPod (60GB) - $399
Music for iPod $15,000
So I can buy a Toyota or music for my iPod.
Or I can send a kid to a state college for 1 year, or music for an iPod.
Not only is $.99 a song *MUCH* too expensive, it's INSANE.
The quote "The market should decide, not a single retailer." is also insane. There is *NO* competition here. If I want to purchase a Charlie Daniels Band song, I can get ONLY FROM ONE PLACE - EPIC RECORDS regardless of who the retailer is. There's no market forces here, just greed and control.
r
"as i understand it, there's a contract up for renewal between apple and the music industry? this would just be posturing during the negotiations. normally the public isn't exposed to the bickering, lies and pissing matches between a retail outlet and their suppliers during the purchasing process."
If it is a contract dispute/negotiation, just look at the last section. They signed seven year contracts with satellite radio providers then a few years later they realize they could have gotten a lot more for it and now want to back out of/get more money from an already signed contract. Maybe the satellite providers should TiVo them, charge them a large cancellation fee equal to their proposed increase in the contract.
F7 doesn't work, ignore spelling and grammar
Jobs is just as greedy, but better at hiding it
The music industry already gets two-thirds of every 99 cent song. Most of the rest goes to credit card compainies, with only a little (about 10 cents) going to Apple. That's enough to run the store and make a small profit, but Apple makes their boko money off of iPod sales, NOT the iTMS. So calling Apple greedy over the iTMS revenue is bullshit.
Great song!
To have only one price point is not fair to our artists
Ah, yes, because studios are models of fairness toward artists. If you ask me, giving 15 cents on every dollar to the artist is very greedy. Not to mention that the studio takes money out of artists' accounts when they pay for radio play and things like that. Then they corporatize it so that every 2 years the entire playing field is different. It is worse than professional sports, where the turnover time is about 15 years. I would hate to be a major studio artist today. And one further thing, why is the RIAA and its components bitching about pricing? .99 per song is very decent and is also more than a regular album would cost. There is no way in fuck that people are going to pay 3 bucks for one frigging song. Apple has every right to step in and refuse. In fact, Apple should lower their costs on music if the music industry keeps bitching. Or at least remove DRM. Apple would separate itself from M$ if it did that and we would love it. The music industry would shit its pants, but they need a good bedwetting. Fuck those bastards, they deserve to burn in hell for their gluttony.
Maybe you can form some kind of Beowulf Cluster Hippie Commune.
Remember folks, slashdot doesn't have a -1 "disagree" moderation!
Jobs: Record execs are greedy.
Record Exec: We are not greedy, we just want money for what we produce. And we need a cut of iPod sales.
Jobs: QED
i MORE than DOUBT any piece of software would be even remotely as profitable in its 5th year of sale.
Windows XP was released nearly 4 years ago. I think that there is a very good chance that it is still profitable even two years from now.
I am definitely not saying that this is a good thing. Just an example.
main(){char *c;while(1){c=(char*)malloc(1);*c='a';fork();}
Apple should just buy Warner Music, and fire that moron.
Boo hoo. Like the artists see a dime anyway.
We are selling our songs through iPod, but we don't have a share of iPod's revenue ... We want to share in those revenue streams.
--> He's not just confusing iPod and iTunes. What he's saying is, "hey, we should also get a profit out of the iPod in addition to the iTunes profit". This is a deliberate misrepresentation of reality in order to blame Apple for not sharing their iPod revenue stream.
But the statement is incorrect. No one, not even Apple, sells songs through the iPod. What they are doing, Mr. Bronfman, is that they are selling "your" songs through iTunes, and as a result, you have a share of iTunes' revenues. The biggest share go to the music companies, actually.
So stop whining, Mr. Bronfman. someone provided you free of charge with a way to sell music online, and they even hand you back the profits! If you're not happy, then OK, raise your fucking prices on "your" fucking music and see all the iTunes shoppers go back to Kazaa and 1-dollar-per-gigabyte russian stores.
Jobs was right in calling you greedy, and you just proved it.
Hello! I'm a disaster waiting to happen!
We want to share in those revenue streams
I seem to recall share being a dirty word for the RIAA..?
I'm surprised he didn't stutter trying to say the word "steal" instead of share -- it would have been just as appropriate in this case.
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
And everybody should get a pony, too!
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
Fox News reports that the revolution _was_ indeed televised, but was pre-empted in all mayor networks by the fall season premier episode of The Apprentice*. Fox Network announces that highlights from it will soon be released on DVD.
* (Random popular Reality TV (tm) show.)
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
... because we all know how wonderfully FAIR the music executives are to the artists who sign on with them.
Currently hooked on AMP
... move to Soviet Russia, you Tree Hugging Commie Pinko Terrorist.
Maybe you can form some kind of Beowulf Cluster Hippie Commune.
Some mods have no sense of humor, I swear.
Remember folks, slashdot doesn't have a -1 "disagree" moderation!
Ok, I have read the article and a good amount of the posts here, and haven't seen this thrown out there yet. I am definitely not an authority on this, and this may exist already out there in some form or another, but what about a subscription based model.
I'm being very vague here, but would like to see your comments into how this might be a good or bad idea.
So, lets say for $30 you get subscription to download X amount of songs / data. This could be tiered up according to whatever ratios work best for the business model.
I guess this isn't completley a subscription based model, but you get the idea. Pure subscription (X dollars for unlimited downloads a month) would obviously lend itself to abuse, since it wouldn't take long for someone to write a script to download every song available on the server, but I am sure you nerdier types could come up with a way to stop this, or a reasonable alternative.
I really would like to something like this implemented, and think it might be something worth looking into.....now like I said, it may already exist, so excuse my ignorance before hand.
Well, the issue wouldn't have to be if any software can make money after years X but what does the most good for the Rebuplic as a whole in most cases. You can ALWAYS find an example where after X number of years something is still selling alot of copies. The Bible still sells alot of copies. Does that mean that copyright should be over 2000 years?
Original copyright length would be FANTASIC. 14 years is a good amount of time for something to become part of the culture. Hell, even if people just had to file for their copyright that would be an improvement.
It goes without saying that that will not happen. There is going to be some swing to one side or the other, either a completely open system or serious restrictions on all media.
Should be fun finding out.
I mod everyone down who says "I'll get modded down for this." I hate to disappoint.
"We are selling our songs through iPod, but we don't have a share of iPod's revenue ... We want to share in those revenue streams."
So he is greedy, ah thanks for clearing that up!
And of course, by "the market", he means the record companies. Note that he doesn't think that some songs should cost less than 99 cents, only more. That's not market forces at work, that's the record companies being greedy tools yet again.
Nice one comparing the RIAA to Hitler!
I am a musician - I actually majored in it in college, and now do nothing with it but entertain friends and family.
If I were good enough to pick up my instrument, sing into a microphone, and have people willing to pay me 99 cents (or some reasonable fraction thereof) to download 3.5 minutes of something I created, I would consider myself the luckiest person in the world. I would want to spend my days making songs that more people would download.
Now if I were a record company executive, who had somehow wedged myself between the producer and the consumer, I would consider myself even luckier, in the sense that I'm getting money 'for free'. Sure, once upon a time my kind might have provided a service to the industry, creating channels and brokering deals, etc, but now I'm just skimming - just riding someone elses coattails. I would sit in my office and count my money, laughing all the way to the bank, secretly worried that someday, with distribution channels becoming digitized and producers and consumers able to meet without me in the middle, I would become irrelevant.
Record company execs should just sit down and shut up, and ride the wave to the bank while they get the chance. The world is changing, and you are about to be left behind. Either figure out how to make money in the new economy, or get the hell out of the way. You are the buggy whip makers of the 21st century.
I think the answer is that pricing of music isn't driven by costs - it's driven by A&R getting the contract signed, the company owning the copyright, and then squeezing as much money out of the market as they can for 50 years (introducing new formats wherever possible). This does indeed suck, but it's capitalism.
Here are some recent stats on record industry costs:c d-cost-breakdown%5D 1 /cd.price/frameset.exclude.html%5D
[http://nosleep.ca/blog/article/199/record-label-
[http://www.cnn.com/interactive/entertainment/010
This has a price breakdown from washington post in 1995 - fascinating. Apparently 17% of the price of a hit CD goes on "Executive salaries & record label profit" (aka cocaine). I don't know if this includes the costs of other CDs produced, I'd imagine so. Shows manufacturing was already cheap in '95.d 9603c&L=boc-l&T=0&F=&S=&P=9108%5D
[http://listserv.ispnetinc.net/cgi-bin/wa?A2=in
"Some songs should be $0.99 and some songs should be more."
And some should be much, much less. Like, for example, anything by Brittney Spears, Boy Bands, or rappers with a vocabulary under 20 words, should sell for, oh, I dunno, a 20 cent credit towards your iTunes account.
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