U.S. Investigating Online Music Pricing

An anonymous reader writes "Times Online has a story about the U.S. Federal Government investigating whether the music labels are fixing prices for online music sales. 'The antitrust division is looking at the possibility of anti-competitive practices in the music download industry ... Mr Jobs suggested such a move would drive owners of Apple's iPod, the hugely popular digital music player, to piracy, a problem that has cost the music industry billions in revenues in recent years.'"

Comments

Re:Get the Message?

[P3NIS_CLEAVER]

Would it be unusual for a big company to file a complaint with the DOJ about this type of behavior? You are crediting Steve but I wonder if this is just business as usual for large companies.

You don't understand economics

[geekee]

"By the way, ever notice that the retail price of a CD and of a DVD are about the same? We know the music CD has far less data on it, and costs less to produce at the studio to stamping plant stages. Even if unit sales of each are comparable, the CD should be cheaper, probably by a factor of 10 or more (CD studio cost ... $1M , DVD studio cost ... $30M). Music people have no one but themselves to blame for piracy. It is just payback for the gouging they do on a regular basis, even at WalMart."

What something is worth is due to supply and demand, not how much data is on the disk or how much the original costs, or whatever. So why is music more expensive per bit than a movie. Maybe because a person who buys a cd will play it many times while most people only want to see a movie once, so the demand for owning movies is lower than owning music.

"Music people have no one but themselves to blame for piracy. "

That's intelligent. Blame the victim. Msuic producers have the right to set whatever price they want. You don't have the right to just take something because you can't get it at a price you want.