Slashdot Mirror
Costly Music Store Coming to Cellphones
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "The new Sprint Music Store is the first legal music downloading service you can access right from a cellphone, and Wall Street Journal tech columnist Walt Mossberg gives high marks to the interface, download speed and playback quality. But he criticizes the 'stratospheric new price for the legal download of a single song: $2.50.' Sprint justifies the price because of the convenience and usability of its store. Mossberg responds, 'I believe something else is at work here: a lethal combination of two industries many consumers believe typically charge too much. One is the bumbling record industry, which has been seeking to raise prices in the fledgling legal downloading market even as it continues to bleed from free, illegal downloading. The other is the cellphone carriers, or, as I like to call them, "the Soviet ministries," which too often treat their customers as captive and refuse to allow open competition for services they offer over their networks.'"
Does this line mean that Zonk went to the WSJ and cut-n-pasted this article into slashdot as though someone submitted it, or did someone from the WSJ actually submit this to slashdot?
Either way, I'm not sure I like the precedent. (Seeing as how WSJ is subscription-based.)
My other car is first.
Am I the only one who sees this statement as falsely implying that all free downloads are ilelgal as opposed to those not authorized by the copyright holder/on works in the public domain, or is it just me?
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
This type of high pricing is increasing the copying of music and other illegal activities ..... if these songs are priced properly then i think it will help in stopping piracy.
i work for money, if u want loyalty, Go get a Dog.
is that the plan might actually work. I mean, on a per minute basis, it is actually a better deal than ring tones. Who is buying this stuff and why are they buying it I have no idea. Where's Darwin when you need him?
Consumers will determine if the 2.50 is a lot of money for a song. Many consumers decided that forking $2+ for a ringtone was well worth it.
Okay, the occasional ringtone someone has to have, I can see someone paying for.
But to listen to half-assed quality tunes on a device not made for that and probably sucks the batterylife of said device, I don't see this thing suceeding in pulling in regular customers to make decent revenue.
Who'd pay 1-1/2 times iTunes price? Which is already overpriced considering what I can get some used CDs for on amazon.com or ebay or half.com, etcetera.
People who use ringtones deserve to pay too much.
Because it's less hassle just to pay $3.99 than to trial-and-error their way through transcoding files into the appropriate format and then transferring them over via Bluetooth or USB. That's the fault of the UI designers and engineers, not the end users, and your patronizing attitude isn't helping things.
In the context of Doc Searls' interesting essay about communications carriers in general, this is called bundling and it's a classic example of vendor-lockin.
Sprint couldn't just give you decent Internet access and have you go out onto a competitive net and find your own music vendor. They have to try to tie you to their own over priced service. To many carriers, a free and openly competitive Internet puts puts them out of the game by reducing them to what they really are -- nothing more than carriers. Expect more of this in the future.
$2.50 per download. When a cd costs about $12 - $18. That means even for a cd with 10 tracks, the cost is $25. So, they lower their distribution cost to almost nothing and raise the price?!?!?! This is crazy. If they want people to not download the songs for free, why don't they make it affordable. If they charged a reasonable fee (like $0.25 per download, people would download songs like hotcakes around the world). Imagine the worldwide market of say 1 billion internet users and rising as opposed to the few people who will actually download this stuff.
No Sigs!
Ok, I stand corrected. Sorry for being US-centric-- that's what I get for posting off-the-cuff remarks.
Europe has a better market for mobile phones then the US. We're lucky if we can get a phone that has USB capability, and they usually only use proprietary cables.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
"Sprint justifies the price because of the convenience and usability of its store."
In other words, folks, NOBODY BUYS MUSIC! They pay for the CONVENIENCE of accessing what they view as FREE music!
Sprint's price will prove to be too high, of course - the sweet spot has already been demonstrated by Apple to be "under a dollar".
But the point has now been made by a major corporation - NOBODY BUYS MUSIC!
The only reason people spend money for music is the CONVENIENCE. Only for the few decades when there was no ability to record music at home - i.e., during the early days of phonograph records and no tape recorders - did people EVER PAY for music. They paid to LISTEN to music - not the same thing at all! They paid to go to concerts, or clubs, or wherever an artist was performing.
People will pay for a performance by a live person since they know people don't work for free.
People will also pay for an object that lets them listen to music wherever and whenever they want - whether that's a cassette recording off the radio, or a ripped CD on an iPod.
But they will NOT pay for music itself!
Get a clue, music industry and artists! Change your business model!
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
1) Cell phones have the same problem as broadband... somebody has to install all the last-mile equipment. It's a pretty big investment, so only a handful of companies do it. And ultimately those companies are able to throw their weight around, even when they resell their traffic to other carriers.
2) In the US, consumers buy their cell phones from the carriers, instead of directly from the manufacturer. They do this because carriers give them a big discount in exchange for a longer service contract. However, this means that the relationship between the carrier and the manufacturer is very strong, so the carriers have a lot of influence over what features the manufactuers build into phones. It's kind of like what would happen if the cable company were able to tell the TV manufacturers what to do, or if broadband ISP's were able to tell computer manufacturers what to do.
The experience I've had pushing j2me apps to Carriers is they are extremely detatched from the technical capabilities that their networks support, and are driven by marketing people who barely know how to use email and are focused on getting teenagers to dl crap that daddy will pay for.
First the ringtone market seems to be booming, from over 2 billion now to maybe 5 billion in the next few years. Why do people buy these ringtones? Why not just download the song, crop it, and transfer to phone. Well, many people don't know how to do the later. And even if they did, imagine the value of showing your friends that you have a cool ringtone.You are out drinking your $5 beer or $5 coffe, perhaps $2 for a song is not so much.
Second, people pay a great deal of money to see a concert that is mostly lights and mirrors, when an equally talented musician could be seen for much less, sans the flash. Why do people pay so much for these concerts? For the music? To be seen? For the socilization? To have beer spilt on thier clothes? Clearly the value is there.
At the end of the day, people spend money on stupid stuff. Perhaps the market for this is kids who do not have money for an album, but can afford to buy single songs off thier phone, then figure out some way to pay for it at the end of the month. Perhaps the retailers are hoping that everyone with a cell phone will buy one song per month. Clearly the cash is there, and the impulsiveness is there. Now we have opportunity. People want phones to do cool stuff. At this markup no one has to sell a lot of songs, just a few.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
-Well ...only one in one thousand !
-Let's see : $2.50 x (# customers) / 1000 .....Hey! it's profitable !
-Let's go for it...
What stops you using a different device?
Unavailability of compatible "different devices" in the United States, perhaps? I've looked but failed to find any providers with decent coverage in the United States that advertise SIM-only plans or any place to buy a SIM-less GSM phone in the United States.
The phone companies are doing what they do best. Run
a monopolistic business. Right now they are making huge
profits off of things like ringtones, wallpapers, games, music,
etc because they control the way consumers can access these things.
What other type of device do you own where the content is controlled
by the place you purchased the device from?
There doesn't seem to be any way to stop this because they have
huge lobbies in Washington passing legislation that is favorable to
them.
And..guess what? They very much desire to control trade on the
internet in the same way. So if it it isn't stopped here and now, expect
things to get much worse.
Anytime competition is artificially stifled the consumer will suffer.
That pricing model is insane. If the average CD has 10 songs, it will cost me $25 to download a CD worth of songs. But what's more crazy, is that people are going to do it. And what's even crazier than that, is that the record companies are going to use it to go back on Apple and say "we are selling tunes for $2.50 through Sprint, this is irrefutable proof that you need to raise your prices." In reality, it proves nothing except that people are stupid and don't realize what they are spending until they get their bill at the end of the month.
Personally, I have a hard time justifying spending 99 cents on a track through iTunes. It's not that I cannot afford it, it's just the principle behind it. Basically I'm giving 2 or 3 cents (best case) to the actual artist, while a bunch of greedy bastards get rich by screwing the very people that keep them in business (both consumers and artists). This has been gone over a million times here before, so there's not really any need to explain this further.
I haven't purchased a CD in roughly 3 years. I listen to satellite radio, and I go to shows when the artists I like are in town. BTW, satellite radio is a great way to find excellent artists that are not signed with RIAA labels.
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