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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.
When you think about the ridiculous prices people pay for ringtones it's not that crazy. So maybe it'll work for the songs that you just HAVE to have right now, but otherwise why wouldn't you save a few dollars and just wait till you're home and get onto the iTunes store?
Drag n' Drop DVD Recommendations
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."
Should be The other is the U.S. cellphone carriers... since competition works and takes care of this in all other markets.
In Sweden downloadable music for cellphones is 9 cents (0.69 Swedish Crona) per song from ComvIQ.
Second: No-one outside the U.S. will ever buy music just for their cell phones. Everyone over here uses SonyEricssons excellent K750 or W800i , syncing them with iTunes and MacOSX using scripts like iTMW or apps like Dreamsicle.
Third: I bet a case of beer that SonyEricsson will include iTunes in their cell phones during 2006. The demand is huge and they know they will have to do it, sooner or later. Nokia will also include iTunes as soon as they realize how Real sucks bigtime.
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.
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.
This might be the first in the US... but its miles from being the first available elsewhere in the world. Usually the US is a mobile backwater that lags the rest of the world by around 2 years or so, in this case its around about that mark again.
Japan and Europe have had legal download services for a significant amount of time either via 3rd parties or more recently directly, when it was being talked of as "what is next" in this market.
So like Sprint now do NFL, Europe has been doing Football (Soccer) goals for 3-4 years. TV on your mobile... yup got that... loads of crappy shit you never want... got that... and you'll be getting it soon.
Its expensive over in Europe too against iTunes et al, but that is down to the "convenience" factor (and normally lower quality) of the mobile downloads.
But "first"? Not by a long chalk.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
People who use ringtones deserve to pay too much.
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!
...when dealing with monopolies.
Copyright creates one such monopoly. Since marginal cost is nil, marginal revenue alone controls pricing; as opposed to the efficient pricing based on the intersection supply and demand. This basically means that the prices will be whatever rich kids with the most disposable income will pay, and the rest of us can go to hell.
Since D.I.Y. production is ever more feasible, and the joy of creating music negates any costs to making music, it's obvious that the efficient, market clearing price for music is free.
When you think about the ridiculous prices people pay for ringtones it's not that crazy.
They pay this because cell phones are set up to be a closed platform, so that people can't transfer ring tones onto them. If people could just copy audio to them as easily as they do with a computer, there'd be no market -- there are *masses* of excellent, free, downloadable alert sounds for computers.
The cell phone providers don't want to be *data transfer providers*, as ISPs are -- you pay us $N, you get M amount of data each month, and your software can do whatever you want. That's a competitive market, and much less money is involved.
I'd love to see regulation out there that requires cell providers to allow *any* device (open platforms, maybe something running Linux, whatever) to connect to their network on a flat service rate, or metered based *only* on data provided. The current system is reminicent of the Bell hardwired telephone monopoly back before Bell was made to open up their phone system to any phone devices, as long as those devices didn't disrupt the network.
The fact that SMSes are more expensive than voice data on a typical US plan, for example, is absurd. This kind of screwball valuation only happens in the presence of a seriously non-free market. The incentive should be to use the loose-latency-requirements, low-bandwidth-required SMSes.
I'm one of a tiny handful of people that just won't buy a cell phone because of the fact that cells are magic black boxes run by a monopoly -- I want to be able to write (and download) my *own* alarm clock/scheduler/voicemail/etc stuff, without paying "application-level fees" to the cell provider.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
Back in 1984 (how appropriate), evil Judge Greene dismantled the AT&T monopoly. Instead of a benevolent Ma Bell guiding hapless consumers through an ever-more complex world, we entered an area of free-for-all market. Ma Bell was split into 6 entities. Suddenly, there were multiple telecom providers! Phones sold in stores instead of rented! Competition! Falling prices! Granted, the USA then experienced an unprecedented telecom boom. But telecom stock went into the crapper.
For almost two decades, this orgy of consumer felicity continued unabatted. Then, fortunately, the Clinton administration issued the 1996 Telecom Act, which watered down Greene's edict and allowed a wave of mergers to take place in the telecom industry.
Now, only two telecom companies remain, having absorbed all the baby Bells. We are finally seeing prices climb and customer service go back into the abysses where it belongs. But it was a long, hard road.
(Yes, it was sarcasm. Thanks for noticing).
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
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
This story reminds me of why I very recently left Sprint for a less painful cell phone company. I lived in Nebraska when I got my first phone, and Sprint was the big kid on the block. However, the crippled phone, horrible customer service, and nickle-and-dime tactics made made me only stick with them because they were the best of a sad lot. After moving to Chicago last year, I dropped them and moved to T-Mobile. Wow was I impressed - the bluetooth features on my phone weren't crippled, they have an almost realistic developer community, they don't try to charge you to add your own pieces to the hardware you bought. I suppose Sprint will pick up some people from this for the same reason they got me (they are the only ones doing it right now), but I'm also sure somebody else will do something like this in a more realistic way soon enough (if people want it).
I, however, don't see any need for such a service.
Posted from the wireless couch.
-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.