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?"

Comments

Do they get a share of the sale of CD players?

[Nicolas MONNET]

I don't think so. Why should they deserve a share of iPod sales?

Re:Do they get a share of the sale of CD players?

[BandwidthHog]

That was what I thought at first, but by the time I got to the end of the article, I was pretty sure he really did mean to imply that his industry was entitled to a cut of each and every iPod sold. Perhaps I’m wrong, but Bronfman isn’t known for being the brightest crayon in the sandwich, if you get my drift.

Re:Do they get a share of the sale of CD players?

[nEoN nOoDlE]

I think that movie thing is a brilliant idea. If they'd charge 3 bucks to see a million dollar movie and 15 - 20 to see a 200 million dollar movie, people would just go to see the cheap movies. More cheap movies would be made, usually by indie filmmakers and the big budget crap blockbusters would die out. That sounds great!

Re:Do they get a share of the sale of CD players?

[Jeffrey Baker]

I don't think there's anything wrong with varying prices and I don't defend the 99c price point. What I object to is the record companies trying to dictate the retail price. If they aren't careful, Apple will drop the 99% of music that is crap and control the price to their benefit on the remainder. As the retailer Apple ought to be able to dictate the retail price and negotiate with the manufacturer over their cost. But Apple has already given them a sweet deal by allowing them to dictate terms like songs not available, not available individually, albums costing above the $9.99 price, etc. So Apple is already being really nice outside of the traditional retailer/wholesaler relationship.

I think the record companies do not understand the power relationship involved here. They ought not to go poking the eyes of their largest online retail outlet.

Re:Do they get a share of the sale of CD players?

[anagama]

Defintely a jackass. I bought a Mac in January. I just checked my "purchased music" -- 305 songs. Now granted, about 25 of those are freebie downloads, and some albums have more than 10 songs, but I'd bet I've spent easily $225-$250 in the last 9 months.

In the previous five years before I got the mac, I could count on one hand the number of CDs I bought -- four to be exact, 3 of which were European imports and one of which I bought directly from an independant artist. So yeah - this guy's an idiot -- w/o itunes they would have made a grand total of diddly squat off me. Greedy bastards. Need to toss that out too.

Notice what he didn't say...

[stoneymonster]

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 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.

One little piggy went to market

[mmarlett]

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.

When will someone PLEASE drop the other shoe?

[Chuqmystr]

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

• Like I said above, artists need to band together and have a common voice that is well heard. They need to educate the public of the benefits for everyone of buying music online. I also don't see a reason why record stores cannot buy and resell the same music. There's some other possibilities in that idea alone I'll get to later.
• Artists, producers, recording engineers and marketeers need to tell the labels to go shove things up their big fat collective ass and set out on their own. Ok, we don't need the marketing guys either, my bad. The way I see it artists can hire producers and engineers as need be. Producers and engineers can also go about setting up their own studios and labels. These "micro labels" could be more versatile and contract themselves to artists who have their own studios as well as providing the entire package. They could offer multiple sales outlets such as direct sales, making a deal with itunes, or basically giving the artist pressed media and masters to go sell on their own.
• We need more stores like itunes and they all need to agree on some standards, eg DRM (it will never go away so we'd best figure how to make it easy to live with) format of files, licensing and probably a lot of other things I'm overlooking. Hey, Lord Steveness, if you really want to take the world by storm and piss off "da man" then why in the fuck don't you quit dry humping your giant, inflatable luv ipod and stat licensing your music tech to those who want it? You could sell the "build your own itunes store" in a box. You could be selling Garage Band and some well polished editing/recording apps all rolled up in a studio packaged G5, and, OMG, it one-click [uh, better make that 3 clicks or Bezos will sick a lawyer on you] publishes to "iTunes in a box". Oh, and thee other digital music player manufacturers have well proven that they just can't make something as cool as the ipod so you might as well license your DRM to them as well. Hell, look at Motorola, you gave them the entire thing, interface, DRM and the name association and they still managed to fuck it up. My point is your precious ipod is safe. You need to take full advantage of what it has built for you. Geeze Steve, you could pwnz0r the music industry. I could go on this tirade for a *very* long time.
• Music stores could play a big role in all this. Why shouldn't the artists and micro-labels sell to them or sell from the shops on consignment? People are still going to want to buy CDs for a very long time to come and probably some other medium beyond that. I also envision kiosks in these stores where folks can purchase music electronically and burn CD's or even upload playlists they've just compiled to their players. Um, retail version of itunes there Steve-o?

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

Feedback loop

[Have Blue]

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.

Well, that's easy to solve, then

[mcc]

"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?