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Cellphone Songs Overpriced?

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the squeeze-em-till-the-money-stops-coming dept.

Carl Bialik writes "Sprint's music store, the first major legal music-download service accessible from cellphones, is charging $2.49 per song because the recording industry and the wireless carriers are engaging in 'a dangerous fantasy,' according to the Wall Street Journal. From the article: 'Since people will pay $2.49 to download a snippet of a song, there's no reason they won't pay that much to download the whole thing. It's an enticing prospect, but one based on the idea that ringtones and downloads are similar. They're not; customers don't see them the same way and won't pay the same price for them, and no amount of wishful thinking will make them change their minds.' Last week, Journal tech columnist Walt Mossberg also criticized the pricing: 'For that kind of money, you'd better really, really, really want to download that new Kenny Chesney song, RIGHT NOW, before you can get to a computer.'"

4 of 270 comments (clear)

  1. Didn't we just discuss this... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    yesterday? I didn't realize the WSJ was so desperate for clicks.

    1. Re:Didn't we just discuss this... by singularity · · Score: 5, Insightful

      How come every time I see a comment with these sentiments modded up to a 5, the user number of the poster is a bigger number than I have ever seen on the site?

      Take a look at my user number, and then repeat with me: Slashdot has not changed that much over the years. All the "problems" you mention have been around since the beginning. Which is it - do you want Slashdot to fix them, or do you want Slashdot to remain what it is?

      I was writing about this over three years ago!

      --
      - (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
  2. Highest Rated Comments From First Posting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    #1:
    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?

    #2:
    First: Mossberg is almost right.

    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 [tele2.se].

    Second: No-one outside the U.S. will ever buy music just for their cell phones. Everyone over here uses SonyEricssons excellent K750 [sonyericsson.com] or W800i [sonyericsson.com] , syncing them with iTunes and MacOSX using scripts like iTMW [fidisk.fi] or apps like Dreamsicle [kaisakura.com].

    Third: I bet a case of beer that SonyEricsson [sonyericsson.com] will include iTunes [apple.com] 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.

    #3
      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.

    There.. now the discussion can end.

  3. avoid the whole thing: by drijen · · Score: 5, Insightful

    For over a year now, i've been using audacity and kandy to make my own ringtones and transfer them via a $11 USB cable to my Motorola V180. Voila, free ring tones from my massive collection of music.

    Not only that, but i can generally make much better sounding snippets, and pick the part of the song that i like (or the whole thing).

    This works great for wallpapers made with gimp/xv/imagemagick as well.