Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
(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.
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.
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.