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Music Industry Threatens to Pull Plug on Apple
bacterial_pus writes "First the music industry wanted
more money, by changing Apple's 99 cents per song policy. Now one exec is
threatening to pull the plug on Apple if Steve Jobs doesn't change the iTunes Music Store pricing." From the article: "Nash's comments echoes those made last week by Warner CEO Edgar Bronfman, who called for Apple to adopt variable pricing and share out revenues from iPod sales. The record companies' position is based on the dubious argument that digital downloads sell iPods. In fact all the evidence points to the opposite: that iPod sales have driven demand for downloads. The vast majority of digital music sales are made by iPod owners. Cut off Apple and the labels digital sales will slump." More recently Jobs resisted their pressure, and the execs snarked back. Looks like they're getting more serious.
no.. that "share" is ipod sales. ITMS barely breaks even.
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The record companies should check with Michael Eisner before they fuck this up badly. You do not renege from a deal with Steve Jobs, and you do not double-cross him at the deal table. Pixar SAVED Disney to a large extent. With the ABC albatross around the neck during the 90s, the only thing Disney made massive revenues from were the box office hits conceived, created, and executed by Pixar.
When negotiating with Jobs beyond the initial five-picture deal, Disney then tried to play cheap. Pixar walked. Disney is now having to learn how to build Pixar-caliber films all by themselves and they're finding that it's, ah, hard.
The record companies had better take a lesson from this; if it's just their own stupidity or some other forces causing them to draw a piston on their own foot, they'd better watch it - building a successful online music store isn't easy, and it won't be profitable for them, as selling music through iTMS currently is.
The record industry is too anachronistic to have the foresight to create this solution themselves and are still obsessed with selling a solid medium (LPs, tapes, CDs), while treating its customers as criminals and artists as expendable commodities that can ignore paying royalties if they can help it
A brief look at the practices of the record industry reveals that they are the dishonest lot:
Apple earns less than a nickel per iTunes track
States settle CD price-fixing case
RIAA Continues Distributing Dud CDs to Satisfy Settlement
A music industry case study Shows how little the artist makes thanks to middle men like the record industry
Wal-Mart Wants $10 CDsRemember when CDs first came out and people said it was too expensive and the record industry promised that it would go below $10 eventually. Never happened
How Apple saved the music biz
FTC: Labels charged with price-fixing - again
Music Firms to Look Harder For Artists Owed Royalties Spitzer announced a settlement in which the nation's five largest recording companies promised to do a better job of tracking down and paying $50 million in unclaimed royalties to thousands of performers.
Finally, last night 2005-Sep-29 on Nightly Business Review (NBR) was a four part series on the music industry. It shows how iTMS allowed one relatively unknown electronica artist sell directly to her consumers with the iTMS . Her music was featured on NPR and then people all over the world wanted to download and listen to her music. Stores like iTMS are the great equalizer from years of abuse from the greedy record labels. "The Business of Music,"-Part 4: The Down Low On Download Distribution