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Jobs to Labels- Lose the DRM & We'll Talk Price
eldavojohn writes "Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been talking smack about DRM and has recently issued a verbal offer to major music lables stating that if they are willing to lose the DRM, he'd be willing to raise his 99 cent price for those iTunes songs. These tracks (such as the recent EMI deal) would also have better sound quality & cost about 30 cents more."
actually, from TFS, not just TFA, the higher prices will also come with higher quality audio.
No DRM + higher quality audio = possibly worth a 30% increase in price
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They're giving you something you do want at a (higher) price they think it's worth. The lower price you never paid for something you didn't want is irrelevant.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Love or hate Apple, at least they are using their current power to apply pressure in the right direction; no DRM. I don't mind the increase in price as much, because eventually they will increase it anyways based on inflation; so the bone Jobs is throwing them isn't very valuable, but he'll sell it like it is.
I hate monopolies, personally, but in this case it takes Apple's virtual monopoly in this space to fight the other monopolies (I know they are really a group of companies controlling everything, but you understand what I'm saying) in the media space. So I'll stand next to Apple on this one; for the time being.
No DRM + higher quality audio = possibly worth a 30% increase in price
And yet CDs, which are DRM free, have the highest quality audio and will cost about the same, offer a physical medium, and packaging as opposed to what will be available online.
You do know Apple is still charging the same 9.99$ for the whole album right? They only increased the per song price. The songs also come with the album art embeded in the file. You aren't paying more, period. You also get the convieniance of buying online and getting immediate delivery.
(IANAL)
Sure, $1.30 might seem like a lot, but consider the thriving ringtone market, where people spend $2+ for retarded 30 second clips of fergie or whoever, that have ultra-crappy quality, and can't even be listened to anywhere besides a tiny cellphone speaker!
These songs will sell fine.
CDs force you to buy all 10/15/20 tracks though. I don't mind paying (CD price) / ( # of tracks) for an individual song assuming the other factors are constant or close to it. I like being able to pick these 6 songs and ignore the rest.
The physical medium is pretty worthless to me. Maybe even negative value since they create more waste and pollution than an additional file download does.
There are occasions where the packaging is nice, but not very often for me. Most of it's just sitting in the garbage or in a drawer where I'd tossed all my CD cases. How much more would you be willing to pay on every CD for the inserts and such? 50 cents? $1.50?
A year ago, people were arguing "why should I pay $15-$20 for a Cd when I only want 1-2 songs, because musicians suck now adays only have 1-2 good songs" so iTunes starts up. You can buy that one or two songs and save the "crappy filler songs tax". People were happy but didnt like the DRM (which I agree with). So not they're removing the DRM, increasing the quality of the encoding and only adding $0.30 to it. Now people are crying "why should I pay $0.30 more when I can buy the CD for less".... *shakes head* if you want a complete CD then buy the CD, if you want 1-2 songs buy it online. I'm not flaming it's just a perfect example of you can't always make everyone happy. For me this sounds great. When an artist I really like comes out, I grab the CD at a local store, if it's a one hit wonder I hear on the radio, I'll buy the one song online. How is this not a good thing? No this isn't a flame, just frustrated when people ask for things, get it, then complain against their own argument.
Gotta like how someone participating in a soundbite-oriented society (/.) will criticize another for not writing a comprehensive tome detailing the limits and degrees of a statement which is, for 99% of purposes of discussion, true in just a few words.
OF COURSE some CDs have DRM. MOST DON'T. This in contrast to the subject at hand, being songs downloaded from iTunes, which practically all DO have DRM.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
in this case it takes Apple's virtual monopoly in this space to fight the other monopolies (I know they are really a group of companies controlling everything, but you understand what I'm saying) in the media space.
You want the word "monopsony" rather than "monopoly", in the sense you used it (a single buyer, or in this case broker, exerting pressure on sellers).
Most recording studios these days use, at the very least, 24bit audio at between 96-196+ khz. While I agree with you that most people won't hear a difference, audiophiles will hear a difference. My mother can't tell the difference between a hissy cassette tape and a CD, but that doesn't mean there isn't one.
The interesting point here is that online music sales could potentially supply consumers with higher quality audio than currently is available with CD. Changing the way CD's play audio would take years. Whereas many people already have good quality sound cards capable of delivering higher quality audio.
The obstacle is obviously file sharing. People sharing sub-CD quality audio is one thing, having them sharing studio-master audio is a completely different thing.
Jobs is playing the PR game, trying to unalign Apple from DRM. That said, any move away from DRM, PR motivated or not, is to be lauded.
You haven't seen much improvement in book tech over the last 100 years, and those improvements have been incremental. The same thing is happening to audio and video; once you've made things as nice as people can perceive, there isn't much more to be done.
Apple doesn't have a "Monopoly" in any sense of the word. They have a complete vertical market solution, which is not the same as monopoly. You are free to choose other market options that are reasonably close facsimile of what Apple produces, but you'll be giving up the virtually seamless integration by doing so.
Apple's iPod and iTunes both handle two INDUSTRY standards for encoding, and ONE proprietary DRM feature, a DRM feature they (via Jobs) are trying to remove.
I never got the gripe of you Anti-Apple whiners. Go, use Rio, or Zune, or whatever else is out there for playing MP3s and WMA (proprietary format) nobody is holding a gun to your head. Go, Use allofMP3 and any other source for Downloading Music. Hopefully you don't have to be a technical genius to get it all to work right, because if you do, then you're obviously missing the point of iTunes, iPod, iTMS and the whole integration thing. It Just Works (TM).
I gave my wife an iPod last year for her birthday, she didn't even know what it was! The she picked up and used it, and started Ripping her CDs to the iPod right away. It just works for her, and it is "easy" for her. Which is the whole point, isn't it? Point Click Rip Sync.
We got it hooked into the car, the iHome in the kitchen, the Main Whole House Stereo system, because "It Just Works(TM)".
If you want to call that a Monopoly, fine, go ahead. I call it building a better mousetrap, and Apple has done a great job in making a Music Player Experience that is pleasant. Sorry if it doesn't support Ogg or Linux or whatever else you think it ought to. It does support MP3 and ACC, both open formats, and can rip, burn CDs quickly and easily, and support from many third party add-ons, and works both on Mac and Windows.
So, I don't know what the beef is all about. It isn't the monopoly you think it is.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Oh my fucking god, you people are unbelievable.
A couple of months ago when he published his DRM views, it was "yeah, right. Until you start selling DRM-free tunes on iTunes, you have no credibility." Now, it's "gimme DRM-free Video from a public company where you're a tiny (a few percent) shareholder, NOW!"
What the hell is it with you people? He's used his influence and control (which everybody constantly complains about) to engineer the largest single rollback of existing DRM in history - can you see Bill Gates doing that? Cut him some fucking slack.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Most recording studios these days use, at the very least, 24bit audio at between 96-196+ khz. While I agree with you that most people won't hear a difference, audiophiles will hear a difference. My mother can't tell the difference between a hissy cassette tape and a CD, but that doesn't mean there isn't one.
Recording studios don't do 24bit 196kHz because they "hear a difference". They do it for the same purpose that Photoshop (for ex.) supports 48-bit images: when you're going to edit this material (filter, change dynamics, amplify, process, speed up/down, remix etc etc), you need extra precision, since from all the twisting and processing, deffects on a 44khz/16-bit piece start to show much sooner than with 24-bit 196kHz.
For studios, the flexibility to tweak the material endlessly without perceptible loss is important, since recording in a proper isolated room with all the proper technicians, musicians, singers, equipment, isn't cheap (cheaper than before, but not cheap).
Audophiles are in the majority losers who can be convinced that 900kHz sounds much better than 800kHz, even if you actually played the same thing to them, but with two different labels. Quality at those levels is subjective, and people's senses are unwillingly manipulated by what they're told.
It's basically the same reason why some people admire paintings like this one. they don't all pretend they understand/like it.
Some are convinced they see something incredible, maybe the author is also convinced he thought of something incredible, thing is, I can put my 5 year old kid and it'll draw the same in 2 minutes and they won't be able to tell the difference and admire just the same.
With DRM, iTunes has a defacto monopoly on legal online musictrade. Not only that, it's tied to the iPod.
When labels open up and start making their catalogs available in non-DRM versions, the barrier of entry to the business will drop significantly, since a music store will no longer need to own a hardwareplatform and maintain a quirky DRM system. This will create more actors on the marketplace, and the price will drop. At first the price will be $1.29, but soon someplace will come along and sell the tracks at $1.20, maybe even $.99. That will force Apple to match this, and in turn, there will be pressure on the labels to lower thier prices.
Jobs doesn't mind that - because he know that he owns the Walmart of musicplayers. Your one stop shop for anything that makes a sound. Therefore he will get the volume, everybody else will just be the long tail. It's much easier for him to be in the front of non-drm music, than to play catch-up after some bored european "consumer"(*)-organisations forces non-drm.
(*) They're all government-run, so it's not like consumers get to decide how, when or if they will be represented.
On a more serious note, track-by-track purchases are a good thing for the music market. Bands who fill their discs with junk and rely on their hit single to sell records will no longer be able to get away with it. I think that means we'll see some talented acts picking up the spotlight instead of the industry-created fluff of recent years. I just hope that artists don't abandon the idea of the album as a cohesive whole - when you're in the mood for something a little deeper than top 40, nothing beats putting on a well-executed musical journey from one of your favorite bands.
Your brain is not a computer.