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."

Comments

Are consumers that dumb?

[seanadams.com]

While on the one hand it is nice to see this pressure to get rid of DRM for "purchased" tracks, it is pretty disappointing to see that the move will also come with an increase in price. They gave us something we didn't want in the first place, and now they're using the taking away of it to justify a higher price? WTF?

This is just a continuation of the trend towards higher prices for music, in spite of plummeting costs for media and distribution. Wax cylinders -> Lps -> tapes -> Cds -> downloads - it just gets easier to move the data, but the price never goes down!

Re:Are consumers that dumb?

[Kjella]

While I agree with you that most people won't hear a difference, audiophiles will believe they hear a difference.

There, fixed that for you. I've read double-blind studies all the way back to c't in 2000, which said that twelve audiophiles and one sound master at a record company couldn't tell CDs and 256kbps MP3s apart. english / german. Let me quote from the summary:

In plain language, this means that our musically trained test listeners could reliably distinguish the poorer quality MP3s at 128 kbps quite accurately from either of the other higher-quality samples. But when deciding between 256 kbps encoded MP3s and the original CD, no difference could be determined, on average, for all the pieces. The testers took the 256 kbps samples for the CD just as often as they took the original CD samples themselves.
(...)
This article will not end the ongoing debate of whether the use of MP3 compression is a reasonable or unreasonable procedure. Audiophile fans that concern themselves with brand names and are status conscious will never listen to MP3s, no matter how many tests may prove that the sound experience is equivalent in both cases. Skeptics (They are all sissies at ct; I would certainly have heard the difference) should get encoders and CD burners and then submit themselves perhaps even using the same pieces and under similar conditions to their own Pepsi-Test.

No DRM cool, higher price not so much.

[dcskier]

Can we still have the option of DRM w/ the lower price? I'm all for getting rid of the DRM on iTunes, but not for the expense of another $.30 a song. Plus the sound quality is fine for me right now, I'm not a audiophile and I'm sure those who are weren't using iTunes in the first place. This just kinda feels like when the cable company adds new features or channels and then feels free to raise your rates since they're making 'improvements' to your service that you didn't ask for.

I thank Jobs for a step in the right direction, but it still has strings attached. Why should I have to pay a premium to own my music, errrr sorry I meant the RIAA's music.