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Apple Shifts iTunes Pricing; $0.69 Tracks MIA
Hodejo1 writes "Steve Jobs vowed weeks ago that when iTunes shifted to a tiered price structure in April, older tracks priced at $0.69 would outnumber the contemporary hits that are rising to $1.29. Today, several weeks later, iTunes made the transition. While the $1.29 tracks are immediately visible, locating cheaper tracks is proving to be an exercise in futility. With the exception of 48 songs that Apple has placed on the iTunes main page, $0.69 downloads are a scarce commodity. MP3 Newswire tried to methodically drill down to unearth more of them only to find: 1) A download like Heart's 34-year-old song Barracuda went up to $1.29, not down. 2) Obscure '90s Brit pop and '50s rockabilly artists — those most likely to benefit from a price drop — remained at $0.99. 3) Collected tracks from a cross-section of 1920s, '30s, and '40s artists all remained at $0.99. Finally, MP3 Newswire called up tracks in the public domain from an artist named Ada Jones who first recorded in 1893 on Edison cylinder technology. The price on all of the century-old, public-domain tracks remained at $0.99. (The same tracks are available for free on archive.org.) The scarcity of lower-priced tracks may reflect the fact that the labels themselves decide which price tier they want to pursue for a given artist; and they are mostly ignoring the lower tier. Meanwhile, Amazon's UK site has decided to counter-promote their service by dropping prices on select tracks to 29 pence ($0.42)."
Meanwhile, Amazon's UK site has decided to counter-promote their service by dropping prices on select tracks to 29 pence ($0.42).
At the risk of sounding like an Amazon shill, Engadget helps those of you looking to get this week's disposable music that's shoved down your gullet on the radio.
They are not without flaw though, even their Barracude by Heart is a confusing $1.29 (must have been an expensive song to produce) and I also rarely find their $0.79 tracks. I think albums on both sites are a standard $10 though, correct? So it's not that big of a difference for people like me that are interested in the artist and the album as a whole when the other 11 tracks aren't phoned in. Sometimes I find shorter albums a few bucks cheaper on Amazon. Haven't cared to check iTunes for that.
Hope the Amazon US site follows suit with that 29 pence action.
My work here is dung.
Does it surprise anybody that the labels would not drop prices when not forced to? There is no competition between different labels to sell the same product (song) so why would they drop the price on a desired product (song) ?
Cemil.
It looks like that really is the answer.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The funny thing behind the "lowered" prices is that various albums used to be offered for $10 with no hullaballoo at all. I bought Throwing Copper (a 90's alt-rock masterpiece) in 2005 for $6, and I bought Blues Travelers' Four just last year for $6.41, both from ITMS. The price of each of those albums now: $10. Admittedly, I didn't get DRM-free versions for the lower prices, but it still seems fishy.
Makes one wonder how many albums like this have actually seen stealth price increases.
We have Amazon. The only thing keeping iTunes relevant is the fact that Apple won't let anything else talk to the iPhone, and they refuse all other music players for the device.
This is a bad move in my opinion and will only encourage piracy. If you do the math, you'll realize that for someone to legally acquire say, 20GB worth of music (3MB avg.) at $1.00 per song, it would cost nearly $7,000. The thing is that as time goes on, hard drives are only going to be getting bigger and cheaper. Additionally as fast broadband becomes even more widespread it will mean that illegal downloading will become easier and the price factor with eventually decrease to nothing.
How much do you think some TV show is worth to a typical viewer? How about a song? Even though it might be $1.00-$1.29 today, as people get more media with the same investment in space and time the value is only going to decline. Your iPod can hold more, so you want more media to fill it up. NOBODY is going to spend $6,000 on their music collection. Well I suppose SOME people might, but certainly nobody that I know would ever even think about paying that much for something they can get for free (and at the same, or near-same quality). Only a dollar per song sounds pretty reasonable, but if you have a 160GB iPod, filling it up will cost $48,000! $48,000?! Just think of what that kind of money can mean to somebody. Pay off the credit card debt. Get a new car. Remodeling. Any number of major things.
I'd say we are QUITE past the point of something "worth paying for". As soon as a person downloads a song "illegally" they cross an invisible line and are now "pirates". And of course once you do it once, it's so easy to do again. That makes it sound like a drug but it's true. If you can get something easily for free, what's the point in paying for it? The best reason I can think of is if you get a significant amount of value added by actually paying for it. When this happens people become significantly more selective about what they DO actually pay for verses what they download for free. And of course, the media itself is practically free.
Basically I think that if companies what to directly sell their media to consumers, it will have to cost fractions of a cent, and they're going to have to come up with some clever ideas on how to provide it to make it easier than simply downloading it for free. It'll probably have to offer other value as well.
For example with TV shows companies should experiment with broadcasts which actually "upgraded" for the web. The idea is that you put your show online with ads for people to see for free. In terms of music, I think bands should get "distributors" which distribute all their music in very large inexpensive packages. Then the band can offer their music for free download on their website for their casual fans, but while simultaneously selling media and merchandise to their more loyal fans (who don't mind spending a little bit to support the band) with added value. I think there are still many ways to make good money off of media, but the truth is that the pay per unit or copy model is dying and won't be around much longer.
Support you favorite artist by buying his/hers CD.
Rip it to your favorite format. I prefer ogg.
Copy it to your favorite personal player, I prefer the Cowon iAudio 7
Simple
Last I checked, (I could be wrong) iTunes and iTunes products are locked in DRM hell, preventing you the freedom to copy your bought merchandise from laptop to portable player and vise versa.
$1.29 per track? WTF, are they made of gold?
What prevents anyone from just copying a favorite tune from the airwaves and slapping it to silicon, for free.
Sounds like a scam.
"Suppose you were an idiot...and suppose you were a member of Congress...but I repeat myself." Mark Twain
Of course, Barracuda by Heart might not be the best example, as it was featured in Guitar Hero 3 and the series (along with Rock Band) as the reputation of increasing sales of their featured songs. Of course the labels are going to raise prices on hits, and sell the crap for cheap, just like those DVD bargin bins.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
Or, indeed, a "whole album" for 69p:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B001NAX5IA/ref=sr_f2_album_9?ie=UTF8&child=B001NB287I&qid=1239156534&sr=102-9
(What do you mean you don't like French 70s prog rock sung in their own made-up language? Some people have no taste...)
It will be very interesting to see what happens to sales on this.
There is a price where profit is maximized. Go too high and the sales drop eats more then the added profit per unit provides.
Old saying: "Fast nickels are better than slow dimes." Let's see if Apple has switched from the former to the latter.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
How quaint.
In the Label's mind:
1.) In demand tunes should be higher-priced due to supply and demand.
2.) Older obscure tunes should be higher priced to recoup production costs over the smaller sales volume.
Historically, big labels would have lower prices on new releases by B-list or unknown artist that they were pushing to break big, or leftover stock that didn't sell and was never going to sell. Digital downloads mean no leftover stock or inventory costs. There may be some "teaser tracks" out at $0.69, from major labels, but not many. I could see an artist on their own label or a small independent selling that low if it would bring a much wider audience to their work.
DMCA - Chilling free speech since 1998.
I realize it makes too much sense for the RIAA to ever agree to it, but the prices should be based on demand. If a song gets downloaded a lot at $.99, then bump it to $1.29. If a song isn't getting downloaded, then drop the price to $.69. That way if a song becomes hot for some reason, they would get more money, and if a song is forgotten, the bargain shoppers will be more inclined to buy it (assuming you could search by price).
I...I'm attacking the darkness!
This is Apple we're talking about, so what would anyone expect? I mean, they add money for adding a white apple to a laptop, so clearly, a few cents here and there on each and every song wouldn't warrant a change.
Actually this is not Apple we're talking about. From what I understand, the labels are the ones behind the price increases. Apple had to basically agree or the labels wouldn't allow Apple to have them on ITMS.
Brand fanboy, brand hater; Opposite sides of the same coin.
obviously, they're overstocked on some songs, so they're lowering the price to $0.69. songs that are in high demand have higher prices because they're more scarce. basic supply and demand, right? :p
They couldn't even manage to put the logo right side up either.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
I don't get the correlation between the size of one's hard drive and the price of music. Why does owning more storage space entitle a person to fill it up for the same price as last year's smaller drive?
A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
Didn't they get rid of the DRM for this price increase though?
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
This article was written way back when the labels started on iTMS. and the author thinks the labels are lying and why.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/11/18.html
Because you can. Why waste space? If not, why do you have a larger drive?
It's amazing to see that people are being forced to pay anything at all for music recorded in the 1920's, 30's and 40's. With the huge majority of these recordings, none of the artists are still alive, nor the producers or other personnel who worked on the recordings.
To say that somehow somebody today still effectively "owns" those recordings and deserves control over them as "properties", and ought to be able to force other people to pay for them, is just a completely absurd situation. These "owners" had no involvement at all in producing the recordings. And the recordings themselves likely made all their investment back plus profits several decades ago.
So why is it that people today are still willing to pay money to get the recordings of these long dead artists? Because they fear legal prosecution for pirating them, of course. The "owners" of this ancient music are nothing other than manipulators of a team of lawyers that will threaten anyone who attempts to access the recordings without payment. Are there some who really feel ethical compulsion to pay for such recordings? Do they really feel they're stealing from somebody by not paying? It's pure absurdity.
This is certainly not what the copyright system is for but it's no surprise that there are people out there abusing the legal system in pathetic attempts to leech "money for nothing" from people who just want to hear the great music produced in those time periods.
The scarcity of lower-priced tracks may reflect the fact that the labels themselves decide which price tier they want to pursue for a given artist; and they are mostly ignoring the lower tier.
that's ok, I'm just gonna "mostly ignore" the legal alternatives to bittorrent
TIAEAE!
This is a bad move in my opinion and will only encourage piracy. If you do the math, you'll realize that for someone to legally acquire say, 20GB worth of music (3MB avg.) at $1.00 per song, it would cost nearly $7,000. The thing is that as time goes on, hard drives are only going to be getting bigger and cheaper. Additionally as fast broadband becomes even more widespread it will mean that illegal downloading will become easier and the price factor with eventually decrease to nothing.
How much do you think some TV show is worth to a typical viewer? How about a song? Even though it might be $1.00-$1.29 today, as people get more media with the same investment in space and time the value is only going to decline. Your iPod can hold more, so you want more media to fill it up. NOBODY is going to spend $6,000 on their music collection. Well I suppose SOME people might, but certainly nobody that I know would ever even think about paying that much for something they can get for free (and at the same, or near-same quality). Only a dollar per song sounds pretty reasonable, but if you have a 160GB iPod, filling it up will cost $48,000! $48,000?! Just think of what that kind of money can mean to somebody. Pay off the credit card debt. Get a new car. Remodeling. Any number of major things.
I'd say we are QUITE past the point of something "worth paying for". As soon as a person downloads a song "illegally" they cross an invisible line and are now "pirates". And of course once you do it once, it's so easy to do again. That makes it sound like a drug but it's true. If you can get something easily for free, what's the point in paying for it? The best reason I can think of is if you get a significant amount of value added by actually paying for it. When this happens people become significantly more selective about what they DO actually pay for verses what they download for free. And of course, the media itself is practically free.
Basically I think that if companies what to directly sell their media to consumers, it will have to cost fractions of a cent, and they're going to have to come up with some clever ideas on how to provide it to make it easier than simply downloading it for free. It'll probably have to offer other value as well.
For example with TV shows companies should experiment with broadcasts which actually "upgraded" for the web. The idea is that you put your show online with ads for people to see for free. In terms of music, I think bands should get "distributors" which distribute all their music in very large inexpensive packages. Then the band can offer their music for free download on their website for their casual fans, but while simultaneously selling media and merchandise to their more loyal fans (who don't mind spending a little bit to support the band) with added value. I think there are still many ways to make good money off of media, but the truth is that the pay per unit or copy model is dying and won't be around much longer.
Perhaps for the POP music lovin' hordes you find the thought of buying an artist's entire disc unconscionable but most of us who have bands we love, buying the entire disc for
Somehow, roughly 10 discs will cover your 7GB theory.
Apple's not going to complain too much. They got me to buy their player and I bought the artist's work in some other means.
I thought iTunes was supposed to make it more convienent to buy music than to rip it off.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Haven't the labels been chafing under the fact that itunes has a majority share in the online music market for quite some time? Is there a possibility that the labels know that the new pricing (set by them and not apple) will driver customers away from apple, and are setting the prices "too high" deliberately in order to do just that?
Just because hard drives increase in capacity does not mean that I have to fill it up, and fill it up with just music.
For comparison, let's take my own personal case. I'm 17, and my entire music collection clocks in at somewhere around 3.6 G (ridiculously small compared to the old timers 'round these parts). But that's 3.6 G including a whole lot of songs I don't listen to.
Indeed, most of my current music comes from free sources like jamendo, where artists put up their music under CC (or similar?). So, if I wanted to, I could easily, and legally, download music to my hearts content to fill up my 8 gig iPod. But do I want to, or even need to? No.
I'm not going to bother generalizing trends, but from what I notice from the habits my peers is similar. I have friends that walk around with 80 Gb in their pockets, and yet only fill a small portion of that with music. The rest they fill up with movies, or use it as a really large usb stick/small portable hard-drive.
So yes, while your numbers do illustrate your point, I question their relevancy and applicability, at least in my environment.
You're right about the cost of downloading, it just doesn't work out for the average guy being able to afford it. What I think will happen is a shift from having a downloaded copy where someone is paying per item to some form of subscription model. This being accomplished by either streaming audio/video or some kind of checkout system. Unfortunately, the logistics accomplishing this with portable media like the iPod aren't neatly clear cut - there'd be some kind of DRM to get labels to commit. I think one of the larger players out there already has some kind of subscription model but the popularity isn't great enough that I remember the name and conditions.
...Are Apple forcing people who "upgrade" their Music to DRM free versions to buy their ENTIRE collection of music again not just the good tracks you want to be DRM free??
Say you (not me honest!!!!) bought that 'Selena Gomez' album when stoned out of your mind on mushrooms! If you want to get that Sweet "Sympathy for the devil" track you bought last year DRM free, you would also need to get that Gomez album as well as all the other DRM enabled stuff at the same time!!! No way to choose individual tracks!!
Please correct me if i'm wrong!!
Laters Sol "Have you found the secrets of the universe? Asked Zebade "I'm sure I left them here somewhere"
Well let's say you have a 50GB MP3 collection, would you spend $12,000-$13,000 on it? Ten years ago, would you have even IMAGINED that you'd have a 50GB MP3 collection?! I mean, I remember when 4GB-8GB drives were "freakin' massive!" and that was well into the "Napster era".
Granted, people buy larger storage devices because they don't have much of a choice (I can't count the number of times I only *needed* a small drive but ended up getting something way overkill because it was the smallest drive I could find), but people still find ways to use them. Also, storage capacity and price-per-gigabyte has improved far faster than bandwidth and other technology. So we are hitting that point where people have more hard drive space then they intend to use. That doesn't mean people will never find a way to use it. Remember 640k is enough for anyone and all that jazz...
I mean, do you *really* think that the value of media PER UNIT is ever going to *increase*? My only point is that the value of an individual song or video continues to decrease as people consume more. And people consume more as technology progresses. Bigger hard drives, faster burning devices, more bandwidth, streaming flash videos etc. have all given people access to more material. And whether or not they were ever going to pay for that media and whether or not media companies are losing money because of it is irrelevant. The point is that the value to the consumer keep decreasing and it will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The Internet is a content delivery platform and with that comes media delivery. The more media someone is exposed to the less value each individual "unit of media" has.
Another reason is that the tracks are not available elsewhere. One can pick a single anecdotal example and say, look, they are selling music that is free elsewhere. My anecdotal example is that I have bought tracks there that I needed in a hurry that I have found no where else. A dollar to solve a problem was a bargain. Some people hate paying a penny more than they have to, likening it to theft, but I am willing to pay for service.
That said I find myself buying from Amazon, both physical media and downloads. This will only increase as ITMS is now 1.29. I wonder if this is a ploy by labels to forestall the monopoly that the iTMS might become, or a ploy by Apple to sacrifice quantity and make it up in higher per sale profits. Honestly it is not every user that is sophisticated enough to do anything outside of the program they use. Look at how many people are afraid of OO.org. Look at how may people said how horrible VLC was in a recent thread here on /., even though we can assume many that those people probably have little experience with the program. Now assume they are also afraid of many other things outside of their comfort zone, like ripping a CD or importing music from Amazon.
In any case music has been in a deflationary spiral for years. The last time we saw music keep up with inflation was the introduction of the CD. Now tracks have been stagnant at 99 cents for 5 years, and even if we believe that they were massively overpriced to begin with, we must assume that an adjustment would happen, at least for premium tracks at a premium store. So instead of all tracks inflation adjusted to $1.15, most tracks stay cut rate, while some rise above inflation. And there are still discount places like Amazon, which, as i said, is where I prefer to shop.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
A) I can't stand this stupid idea that people pander around about how much it would cost to fill an iPod. Yes you idiot it would cost that much to fill it with just songs! No, no one I know actually fills their iPod past 20% to 50% with about 10% to 15% being iTunes music.
B) ZOMG!!!111!1!1! You pirate! No, actually about 40% of my iPod is pictures (remember it can do that?!), 15% is music (for me about 5% is iTunes, 10% is stuff from my CDs), 10% is contact information and calendars, 15% is podcast (I drive two hours one way to work), the rest is just junk files from iWork and stuff. I have about 70% of my 160GB iPod filled.
C) Please stop this crap argument! You got +3 interesting for what I equate as a giant pile of horse shit. I know, that's my view point on your comment, but getting down to brass tacks your argument is moot because no one fills their iPod with just music, if they wanted to just listen to music they could have bought any number of MP3 players at a fraction of the cost. Music companies want to make their dime plus whatever they can extort you for, it's just the way people hustle other people, get over it (Dr. Musiclove: Why I stopped worrying and learned to love the ass raping from the RIAA, no really I don't care that it is over priced) OR buy indie music if you really want a flipping change.
D) Really I don't think you're an idiot but I'm so tired of people saying this kind of crap. It's such an uneducated rationale.
Do you really believe any label with an iota of intelligence would pull all of their work from a distribution network like iTunes? Both sides have power in a situation like this, and the $1.29 is most likely a compromise between the two. Apple is out to make money just as the RIAA is. They hold their customers with just as much contempt as any faceless corporation.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
I prefer Zune Marketplace. $15/month, and you get 10 mp3 songs as part of the deal, so it's only $5/month. Plus, the Zune Player now playing screen is really pretty snazzy for some artists. Plus, you can't get a 120 GB ipod. Well, ok you can, but you can't fill it up with subscribed music, or use it wirelessly. Before calling me a troll/fanboi/shill, etc... please address the facts. Thanks! I'm not associated with Microsoft.
"A download like Heart's 34-year-old song Barracuda...."
I bought this song when it was released. Thanks for making me feel old.
You didn't think the tiered-pricing scam was actually going to save you money, did you? No company ever does stuff like this unless they think they can squeeze more money out of their customers.
It doesn't entitle them to anything, it just makes it more attractive. "Hey, I could spend $1,000 putting music on my iPod, or I could just take it. Hmmmmmm."
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Let's say your typical CD has about 14 tracks. That's $14 at $1.00 per track. Nearly any CD can be found for less than $14... even at places like Best Buy and let us not forget that includes the personal fulfillment of a physical copy, booklet etc...
$1.29 x 14 = $18.06.... How can $1.29/song be justified?
This is completely ass backwards. The music industry HAS to price its products lower or it risks looking completely unattractive to consumers. They can't compete with higher prices against its easily available, convenient and free "black market" competition.
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
The value of 10days of music versus 20days is not twice as much. This should be reflected. If I listen to 3hours of music a day with 10,000 or 100,000songs my enjoyment only increases marginally.
If you think about it like a radio station it makes more sense. E-radio stations are charged per song they play. That price is based on number of listeners. So with an infinite number of songs available (like a radio station) paying to broadcast to an audience of 1 (me). It would probably cost me something like 2$ a month if i listened 5hrs/day (I'd pay 5~10x that). With INFINITE music available. Explain why this isn't available. I mean I suppose I could try to actually set up an e-radio with 1 listener and negotiate deals with record companies but that seems needlessly difficult.
...Barracude by Heart is a confusing $1.29 (must have been an expensive song to produce)...
Ann Wilson went off of her diet.
(yes, that was mean, but: before, and after...just saying)
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
I don't know why we bother to whine about MP3 prices. If we don't like the prices, they're all available free for download somewhere else. Conversely, Apple and the labels shouldn't whine about people downloading them free, when so many people are volunteering to pay these ridiculously high and profitable prices to download them from iTunes.
--
make install -not war
Mod parent up.
To think that filesize and price are correlated is absurd. It's the production cost and value of those bits that determines price.
Replace "MP3" with "software" and this becomes obvious. A bargain-bin game might cost you $5/GB, whereas a specialized 10 MB medical/industrial program could cost $10,000 per seat.
I do agree though with the general idea you were touching on though, which is that the intellectual property industry is going to need to adapt to the digital age. Its pretty clear that the IP industry is going to suffer from a sort of "Tragedy of the Commons" ordeal. Many people will have a hard time justifying paying for IP when its 'free' for easy download elsewhere on the internet. The industry can fight back using the law, but looking at past responses the internet has made when the law stepped in, I doubt much can be done. When they shut down Napster, one of the first P2Ps, people simply moved to Kazaa. When Kazaa became crap and came under fire, people moved to the newer upgraded system, BitTorrent. Torrents won't ever likely disappear due to their ease of distribution, but the infrastructure for distribution of torrents (i.e., trackers) may change, if it hasn't already.
The only two real answers to these problems as I see it is for the IP industry to adapt to the new way people view IP, which is as at best, as a free/public universal commodity. Or for the IP industry to collapse due to the lack of income, and cause a reshaping of people's ideals on IP. I suppose a third option might be to have the government step in on the IP industry's behalf (which they are doing?) and manage the issue, but this likely won't be effective. Whichever option is chosen is irrelevant, only that something must change if the IP industry is to continue living. They may be fine right now, because there are still plenty of consumers that understand or believe that its "right" to pay for something they want, but will it remain that way in 20-30 years when acquiring the media may be even easier? Not only that but many of the people that have grown up with access to Napster/Kazaa/Torrents, will continue to use them in the future. And assuming the IP industry doesn't start massive brainwashing campaigns (some exist) concerning copyright infringement; there will be even more kids growing up with the same idea that young generation has right now.
Some may argue that the IP industry needs to revert back to something it use to be, which was people making content simply because they love making it (see some independent bands). This is a nice dream, but not realistic in the least. Music and writing might survive under system of "free" giving, but what of movies and television, which even when they weren't "big budget," were still fairly expensive endeavors.
For example with TV shows companies should experiment with broadcasts which actually "upgraded" for the web. The idea is that you put your show online with ads for people to see for free.
You mentioned using ads to support free content, but if one thing has become clear over the years, it's the fact that many people have come to hate advertising with a passion. Ads are one reason a number of people now download their favorite TV shows off the internet. People will always try to find ways around Ads, and when this becomes pervasive, ads will cease to provide the support needed to run the system.
In terms of music, I think bands should get "distributors" which distribute all their music in very large inexpensive packages. Then the band can offer their music for free download on their website for their casual fans, but while simultaneously selling media and merchandise to their more loyal fans (who don't mind spending a little bit to support the band) with added value. I think there are still many ways to make good money off of media, but the truth is that the pay per unit or copy model is dying and won't be around much longer.
Like I mentioned above, this might work now because some people actually see that you need to put money into the system in order for it to continue surviving. But if s
This is why gift cards are a bad idea. They instantly made my $75 of gift cards worth about $50.
I'm amused to see some people's reaction going something like this:
1. Look, Amazon is charging $0.99 for some of the songs that iTunes has for $1.29. (Though there are quite a few songs both are charging $1.29 for.)
2. This means Apple is greedy and evil!
3. I'll show my disapproval of Apple's greed by continuing to buy music there but clicking over to Amazon and buying from them instead when I see a track that they have for cheaper.
The choice of which price to use for a given song is determined by the labels, not Apple. Given what we've heard of the labels' negotiating history with Apple, Amazon, and other online music sellers, it's reasonable to assume that when iTunes charges more than Amazon for a given track, it's because the labels charged Apple more for it.
The major labels don't like that Apple earned a strong bargaining position against them (by actually building a product and service that customers wanted) and are using their position as monopoly rightsholders to undermine competition among online music stores. What happens if Amazon gets successful enough to try to negotiate pricing or terms changes from the labels? They'll just find another music store to prop up and give Amazon customers the shaft. What happens if some newcomer builds the Next Big Thing in music stores? Sorry, Amazon (or Apple, or Microsoft) is the labels' favored dog in this fight right now, so NextBigThing customers will have to pay a premium.
So, go on and buy from Amazon when you see a track that's cheaper there than on iTunes, but know that to do so isn't "sticking it to the man"... on the contrary, you're empowering the RIAA types who want more control over how you can buy music.
Do you really believe any label with an iota of intelligence would pull all of their work from a distribution network like iTunes?
No, but how many labels actually do have an iota of intelligence?
Advanced users are users too!
Personally, I don't believe there is any justification for *ANY* song to cost more than 69 cents. However, there's an easy answer. Don't buy from them. I am proud to say that I have never bought a song from iTunes and never will.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I reluctantly purchased an ipod a few years ago. I didn't know just how much Id grow to love this thing. I love being able to take tunes with me where-ever I go. Then my laptop crashed, I was able to get all my tunes off the HD but wasnt able to get them all loaded back onto the iPod from the fresh XP installation on the same LT.
ALL of the songs I purchased without DRM I am unable to get back onto my iPod as well as a few others as I changed my password from time to time and cant remember which PW I used when I purchased certain tracks.
So, iTunes sucks major ass. You can't tell me that Apple doesn't have a record of the songs I purchased over the years. I can't download again one's I've already purchased. It's BS.
Now, I purchase all my tracks on CD, rip them using cdparanoia and copy to my iPod. iTunes manages the mp3s I create for my own personal use and my podcasts/vidcasts.
Keep your money as well as your sanity - rip CDs for personal use and dont buy from Apple.
As with everything in today's struggling economy prices are on the rise. It is costing more $$$ to buy anything these days. I am just wondering when we are gonna get big $$$ raises to cover the rising cost of everything??? PRESIDENT OBAMA WHERE IS OUR BAILOUT?????
Apple didn't fool the press. This is being reported as "Apple raises prices 30%".
Content is what goes on Media. The Media includes digital file formats, physical storage devices, paper, etc. The information to be conveyed and stored is Content. You don't put media on your iPod.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13526_3-10214556-27.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5 A quick view of the day's top selling tracks reveals several at $1.29 (which earlier today were under a dollar)
The chance that you LIKE a song decreases with the amount of music you try to listen to. If you can have 100 songs, you will pick your 100 favorites. If you have 40 gigs of music, chances are you hate most of it, the rest is for your friends or you are archiving it for humanity.
THL phish sticks
Did anybody check out the Ada Jones link? One of the song titles is "If the man in the moon were a coon". Wikipedia reveals what may just be the silliest sentence I've ever read: "His first hit was "If the Man In the Moon Were a Coon" in 1906 The song combined two then-popular song themes, Moon songs and Coon songs." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Fisher
Is this a news report or a trailer for a motion picture?
Stop your erroneous ways.
And how much would it cost if legally purchased on CD? Is Apple obligated to undercut the price of other distribution methods? If they cut their price in half, would they really sell twice as much music..?
Do you recall 45's? How about cassette singles? How much did you pay for those? Cassette singles were around $3US give or take. Usually having 3 or 4 versions of the same song.
$1.29 in today's money doesn't seem absurd. I personally use iTunes to locate the music I want, then purchase it from Amazon.com. The quality is better, and I just like Amazon.
With 160GB iPod, what I want is FLAC versions of the songs. A typical CD has 640MB of lossless music. MP3's, even at 320K, have loss. If I have 160GB iPod, I want to fill it up with higher quality songs. I have the CD's I enjoy, such as Pink Floyd, Doors, Cake in FLAC format. Even my old ears can tell the difference.
There's a clear reason it is priced higher: It was in Guitar Hero II. Both my sons and all their friends know Barracuda, and not because of their love for classic rock.
E-radio stations are charged per song they play. That price is based on number of listeners.
I think that will be the idiocy that finally brings down the music labels. Radio play is essentially free advertising for bands, and when good bands start abandoning the labels and offer their music to radio for free the radio stations are going to stop playing the music label music.
NOBODY is going to spend $6,000 on their music collection. Well I suppose SOME people might, but certainly nobody that I know would ever even think about paying that much for something they can get for free (and at the same, or near-same quality).
Actually, you can easily find entire albums on bittorrent at lossless quality (.flac) and of course DRM and watermark free ... only thing is if you're looking for something a bit obscure you'll have a tough time finding it.
As I see it, the convenience factor is really all there is.
Apple has joined Microsoft's pay-per-use plan and plans to offer music rentals in the next version of iTunes. In keeping with Apple's theme as being less evil than Microsoft, Apple plans to charge only $0.30 each time you begin to play a song, whereas Microsoft plans to charge $0.50. Both companies plan to discontinue outright purchases later this year, claiming that pay-per-use will help stimulate the lagging economy. When asked to comment, Apple's new CEO, Steve Ballmer, said "you'll pay every time you listen, and you'll like it!"
Sent from my iPhone
the extra money is for steve's medical bills. the man needs better doctors and only you can help him to afford it.
GH3 actually. ;-) GH2 had "Crazy on You". (I know this because (1) Crazy on You starts out with a really cool and fun opening riff, and (2) for a while Barracuda was the only song in the first few sets that I couldn't 5-star.
Instead of focusing on quantity, why not focus on quality ? If hard drives and broadband connections can handle it, why not offer songs in .wav or flac format ? That will fill a hard drive pretty quick, even by modern standards. It would also give a much needed competitive edge to legitimate sources of music.
Of course this is assuming the pieces of shit running the major record companies have any amount of sense or intelligence.
I didn't even need to click the link to know you were talking about Magma.
YouTube link for the uninitiated.
Momentarily, the need for the construction of new light will no longer exist.
"The amount being paid to the music industry, even though [these] games are entirely dependent on the content we own and control, is far too small," Warner Music Group CEO Edgar Bronfman told analysts last summer.
Guitar Hero drives much more sales than your ad agencies and your lawsuits, assholes. The funny thing is that the recording industry are beginning to attack their own kin, MTV Games!
There is a price where profit is maximized. Go too high and the sales drop eats more then the added profit per unit provides.
You think that's what this is about? First of all, I doubt the people at the record labels are really paying that much attention. The record companies have been complaining for years that Apple wouldn't allow them to set their own prices, and forced them to sell at $0.99. When customers said in return, "Good, we don't want you to drive up prices," the record companies came back and said, "No, we want to lower prices, too!" And no big surprise, they get their chance, and no prices have been lowered.
Part of the problem is that they aren't really interested in the long tail. Competitive pricing devalues their product. If you can get tons of great old songs for $0.02, then it gets harder to convince their customers that another track is really worth $1.29, or more (I'm sure they'd love to be selling $2.00 tracks).
Besides, it's sort of the nature of the beast that record companies are all focused on what's new, what was released last week, what's in the top ten, etc. The less likely it is to sell a lot, the cheaper it should be-- but then again, it's also less likely the record companies are going to worry about songs that aren't going to sell a lot anyway.
Regardless, none of this is what this is about. The record companies are scared of Apple. Apple is the #1 music retailer in the US now, even ahead of all the brick & mortar stores, and Apple's newfound dominance threatens the record industry's control over the music industry. They're trying to prop Amazon up as a competitor by giving them preferable deals, allowing Amazon to sell tracks and albums at significantly lower prices.
So there a couple of things I'm left wondering. First, did Apple have anything in their contracts with the record companies that say only a certain percentage of songs from a label can be $1.29, and a certain percent must be $0.69? Second, if the record companies are propping up Amazon to keep Apple from drinking their milkshake, what makes them think Amazon will be any better?
Not a big fan of logic I take it? Easier to try to tear someone down by claiming brand hatred than it is to prove your point, eh?
If it was the labels 'forcing' this price down Apple's throat, it seems awfully strange that Amazon and Zune are unaffected. It occurs to me that since iTunes sells MORE music than any other music service, that they would have more bargaining power, and would be one of the last services to be 'forced' to change their pricing structure.
No... based on Apple's past pricing structures, I'd be more inclined to believe that Apple is just taking the opportunity to pad their wallets even more. Don't get me wrong... they're perfectly within their rights to do that. Heck, more power to them!
As long as I still have alternatives, I could care less about the people duped into paying the Apple tax.
I buy all of my music, all 1k albums of it. Mostly used at 1-2 dollars a CD at local pawn shops and Amazon over the years.
It's also actually really easy to fill up a 120 GB drive with movies.
I don't pirate and I've got way more music/video than a stack of iPods could hold and I've spent less than 5k in the last 10 years.
I think the real issue is how much music can you realistically listen to. The industry's claim about iPods full of stolen music really falls apart when you consider the logistics of actually listening to that much music. Movies though will blow that out in short order.
Back on topic though. .50 each).
The current price difference (1.29 vs 99) just isn't enough to warrant checking out two stores for the cost of a single. An album maybe. Since I buy CD's used, the comparison is even more stark (yard sale special
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
You know what it's good for? The radio section. I don't even keep my own music anymore. Takes up too much space, figuratively and physically. I just put on the radio, and let them do all the work.
What?
Do you really believe any label with an iota of intelligence would pull all of their work from a distribution network like iTunes?
Yes. They already act together in lawsuits and pricing, why not act together in leaving iTunes for a company willing to give them the price they want? iTunes cannot survive without the labels, but the opposite isn't true (in the short term, anyway).
Such a crazy world. So odd that when demand goes up the price goes up. Not like there is a limited supply of bits. Greater volume should mean lower per-unit pricing.
Moderators: Before moderating a comment Insightful/Informative, check to see if a child post has already refuted it.
I am already consuming media just as fast as I can. During most of my waking hours I am doing at least two of three things: reading, listening to music, or watching video. No matter how cheap storage gets, I can't absorb more songs, movies, or books per month.
But what I can do is absorb those things at higher quality. So instead of each one getting cheaper, I expect to pay the same price but get higher definition or greater utility and convenience.
As an artist - I just hope to hell they are asking $1.29 for my music and they are paying me more!!!!!
Not to say you'll buy it but if you do... thank you.
but guess what.. realistically I don't see a penny more....
Screw the labels.....
Convenience is valuable.
I'd counter that claim using examples of other digital distribution services that are both more convenient and cheaper than their brick & mortar counterparts: Netflix, Steam, Internet news, e-mail, eBook services, online shopping, Internet classifies like Craigslist and from a purely digital distribution standpoint -- even VoIP.
Convenience is okay to charge for (and often is), but competition should eventually bring the price down to what the market can bear. I guess the problem here is iTunes is such a gigantic music distribution channel, Apple & company don't feel the need to lower their prices to compete yet?
Regardless, I might also argue the battle isn't even about convenience anymore. If the music industry is to be believed, their biggest issue is 'pirated' music. With that in mind, I don't believe this is a step in the right direction.
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
I would happily pay for music from the early 20th century. It's hard to find, especially in high quality restoration. So if somebody goes to the trouble of collecting it, restoring it, digitizing it, and making it convenient to find and download then they deserve to make a profit.
I agree that century-long copyright is immoral, but not because it makes old music commercially valuable. It's immoral because it denies the value of old music to society. I have some old 78 RPM Victrola records that I digitized and restored. I wanted to host them on an ad-supported site for others to download and thought I was in the clear since they have no copyright notice and seemed to predate the oldest active copyrights. But then I learned that their legal status is unclear and the still-existing record companies might have grounds enough to come after me. So now they're just gathering dust on my hard drive.
It could be Apple charging more, or it could be the labels acting together to weaken Apple by setting lower prices on other retail outlets. The goal being to ensure that the power to control pricing remains with the labels, not with Apple.
Based on past performance, I'm inclined to believe the labels are making a power play rather than Apple making a cheap profit.
It just hurts them. I buy $.99 things. I don't usually buy things that are more - at higher prices it's worth the 15 seconds it takes me to find the files on bit torrent and download them.
Without BT or affordable downloads I'd just opt to pretend their material doesn't exist. I almost never bought CDs. Even $.99 is high for music because I like to download an artists entire catalog when I hear a song I like - most turn out to be crap but I like to sort through myself. I don't buy much music from iTunes anyway.
My pet peeve is movies and TV shows. Why does a movie cost as much as buying the DVD at Walmart? For that price I may as well buy the DVD. Why do TV shows cost $20-$50 a season? If they'd price movies at $2 I'd buy dozens a month instead of one or two at $5. Make a TV show $.99 an episode or $10 a season and I'd buy whatever sounds good instead of something here and there. And remove the dang DRM so I don't have to remove it after the download.
I don't buy much software but I buy a lot of iPhone apps because at $.99 it's okay if I only enjoy the app for half an hour. It's both cheap and easy to keep track of (for the same reason people like 100 calorie packs of food). Make everything $.99 and you'll make bank if you're offering anything people want at all.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Napster maintains the largest on-demand streaming and MP3 catalog - over 7 million songs - so you don't have to. Never download another file or rip another CD unless you want to. With Napster, you can easily access your music 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
for which they charge $13/month.
No... based on Apple's past pricing structures, I'd be more inclined to believe that Apple is just taking the opportunity to pad their wallets even more.
..and which past pricing structures would those be? I mean if you're going to be a big fan of logic, at least use some numbers.
emusic.com is another viable alternative to Itunes.
-No DRM
-MP3 Format
-Large Selection(Though it is true they tend to have better alternative selections and fewer name-brands)
->$1 per track. (I pay $0.21 per)
There is life in music beyond what is shoveled through the pop radio and TV ads.
Oh one last thing I forgot to mention above.
-Linux Support!
Yes indeed they released their download manager(which is purely optional but useful) for Windows, Mac AND Linux officially.
I'd love to see a Guitar Hero made with songs that the RIAA didn't control.
Though if you ask the RIAA they contro...er "Defend" the rights of all musicians and music(funny how abstract things gain rights these days?). Basically the RIAA tries to act as a governing agency, aka as the government in these matters.
The problem with economic "laws" is that unlike scientific laws they don't change even when a perponderance of evidence is put forth against them.
The "Law" of Supply and Demand is still used as a foundation of many economic theories even though great evidence can be put forth that it is inadequate and poorly suited for explaining most economic climates.
Unemployment has doubled.
Many people who haven't been laid off have taken 10 to 20% pay cuts.
And Apple raises prices significantly for songs.
I'll sit in a silent room before I'll pay more than a quarter for a song.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
True, at least until Live Nation and Ticketmaster merge, and then bands can say goodbye to their performance and merchandise money as well.
http://transformativeworks.org/
It's just the old "get 'em in the door" strategy.
"A cynic is what an idealist calls a realist" - Sir Humphrey Appleby
Although many Apple fans will most assuredly come up with innovative excuses for their favourite company, the truth is that Apple, given the chance, is no different than Microsoft. Without any real competition they will simply milk their customers for as much as they can possibly get away with.
Combine this with an organisation known for its intensive abuse of the financial and legal systems, like the RIAA, then you get a result that will charge you a fortune to lie to you.
GoodbyeTunes.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
Actually, "Crazy on You" was the Heart song in Guitar Hero 2. "Barracuda" was in Guitar Hero 3, which probably hit an even larger audience than 2 did.
Anecdotally, Guitar Hero 2/3 convinced me to pick up one of Heart's Greatest Hits CDs.
That is true. It's also a missed opportunity for a LOT of content publishers & creators.
Savvy marketers know that for every serious purchaser of a piece of content, there may be dozens that have a moderate interest in that content. You can charge a high price ($10) and gouge one buyer, or charge a moderate price ($2) and collect a lot more money total.
Digital distribution of music, movies, and books presents an opportunity for copyright holders to collect 'free money' from out-of-print works. There are huge storehouses of content that isn't currently generating any revenue for publishers because it has been end-of-lifed. The promotion is over, the shelf space in stores has been shifted to current products, and basically, these titles are found only in public libraries, thrift stores, or garage sales- places that don't pay publishers a royalty for every transaction.
Consider an album by Ronnie Milsap and the Foundation series of books by Isaac Asimov. The publishers of those works have already covered their recording, pressing, printing, and promotional expenses for these titles. Today they're exchanged at flea markets for a couple of quarters, tops. There are a few die-hard fans, but most people will avoid the $9.99 charge at iTunes for the Milsap albums or the $7.00 charge for each of Asimov's Foundation books on their Kindle. Imagine, to get the entire Foundation series on Kindle, you'll have to lay out more than $50. How many times is Amazon clocking in those sales on the Foundation series? Maybe one or two, I'd wager. If they could drop the price to $2.00 per book, Amazon would see a lot more people buying the entire series and making many, many times over what they're making off it @ $50. Same with those Ronnie Milsap records.
Sadly, these bigtime publishers think they're sitting on a gold mine of content when they're really sitting on a big warehouse of Salvation Army stock.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
So the more hard drive space I have, the less I should reasonably expect to pay for a song?
Does that logic apply elsewhere? I bought four new bookshelves a while back--so I should now expect to pay less for books? My house has a two car garage, which is twice as much parking as I had at my previous residence--so does that mean I should expect to spend half as much on my next car?
The pricing structures that I'm talking about are Apple prices and... let's call them... sane prices.
Here's a quick example, since you asked:
4.0 GB of RAM (2x2GB) SO-DIMM, 1066MHz DDR3 (PC3-8500)
Apple store $200
Newegg (highest price) $69.99
Feel free to find more on your own. Try comparing hard drives if you'd like. I haven't checked myself and maybe I'm wrong, but I have a hunch you'd find another good example. I hope you understand what I mean by Apple's pricing structures.
Now... how about providing a link regarding your statement about the record labels deciding what price Apple was going to set for music in iTunes? I mean, if you're going to call someone out, certainly you are prepared to back up your own statements as well...
Often buying the physical media is cheaper.
If you say so. The last time I bought an album, it would've been cheaper for me to buy it on iTunes.
But I've learned my lesson. Now I just use BitTorrent.
Amazon also released their downloader (absurdly required for whole albums). Sadly is prepacked for various distributions and no "generic" option, but its a very good step.
Game is Guitar Hero III, not II.
NOBODY is going to spend $6,000 on their music collection.
Some idiots spend that much on a cable!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
So Apple over-promises and under-delivers again. Why is this news?
What was the over-promise all you fanbois are asking as you reach for your Troll -1 mod hotkey? That there would be as many 69 cent songs as $1.29 songs when the record companies -- not Apple -- are setting the prices. Since when has the recording mafia actually reduced prices? Apple should have kept their mouths shut over this fiasco. 99 cents was easy for everyone to understand -- so they had to go complicate it.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
...but only for very high values of 69.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I was well on my way to spending $6000 on a music collection (over several years) but now I refuse to give them another cent. I have hundreds of albums, but if they're going to start treating everyone like criminals, lobbying for terrible laws, etc, I'm not going to support that.
No. With respect, they do change. The First law was Says Law, and it was right. It said "supply creates demand".
The neoclassical economist reject this because it helps fuck poor people to say supply and demand cause price. That is true at the margins, but doesn't explain the price of my bently, first class tickets or other things i can't afford.
10*20(resonably big album)*5(large tracks) = 1000MB, how are you getting 7GB?
700MB != an audio album
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
If i could re-download all my music when i break my computer, i'd seriously consider not-pirating my music.
Hell give me a nice service like being able to access my music collection from anywhere with an internet connection, I'd be damn likely to.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
No it won't. How many albums in flac does it take to match the size of a single bluray movie? (Answer, from a quick look: 60). Size is not a relevant concern when it comes to music these days - home machines have more than enough space, and if you can be bothered to transcode down to quality levels appropriate for noisy public places (I use 48kbps mp3 - yes, really, 48; for on the bus / in the office / around town etc. the external noise is such that you really can't hear the difference), so do portable devices.
It would also give a much needed competitive edge to legitimate sources of music.
Hardly. Pirated music is already available in flac.
I am trolling
Perhaps you're misunderstanding me. Where you've provided an example of Apple using a higher price for an individual added component.
(if I'm not mistaken Apple RAM uses higher tolerances than normal for their RAM - and you can certainly find comparably priced RAM from PC manufacturers for the same tolerance for PC's. This is an assumption so I'll save you some price hunting).
I was speaking of a past instance where Apple has raised the price of a currently released product or service. Surely you can find one of those, because that was in fact the subject.
Now... how about providing a link regarding your statement about the record labels deciding what price Apple was going to set for music in iTunes? I mean, if you're going to call someone out, certainly you are prepared to back up your own statements as well...
Yahoo News: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090407/ap_en_mu/tec_apple_itunes_prices
"In exchange for the ability to set prices, record labels agreed to sell all songs on iTunes without "digital rights management" technology that hampers users' abilities to copy tracks or play them on multiple "
There you have straight from TFA.. The record labels agreed to sell tracks without DRM in exchange for the ability to **SET PRICING**.
10*20(resonably big album)*5(large tracks) = 1000MB, how are you getting 7GB? 700MB != an audio album
unless the assumption is that you're storing them as .wav files?
automatically adds the track to your itunes and WMP libraries
No support for Music Player Daemon? :(
My wife used a subscription service, I bought actual tracks. When I got laid off a couple of years ago, we cut our spending, she turned off her subscription service, I quit buying tracks... but I still had all my music. And Apple's raised the price on some tracks, eh? Doesn't have any effect on the ones I've already bought.
And, of course, remember "Plays for Sure"?
Err.. that would be "Played for Sure"...
A pricewar!
Two giant distributors with DRMless tracks, bidding on essentially free money for all parties involved. After all, that is exactly what digital media is. Not production of said media, but when you have vaults of it, baby, it's pretty close to printing cash.
Oh I guess there is a bit of server cost and bandwidth costs, but I expect that Allofmp3.com had it right after all...
Cheers!
Interesting, but all the tracks on what.cd are still free.
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The stupid situation with iTunes/Amazon is you can buy second hand CDs (whole albums) for less than a single track. But instead of competing with this, the music industry continues to hold on by their little finger to their enormous margins.
They should follow Valve's example and go for high output rather than low amounts at high prices.
I'm guessing you meant <$1 per track, not >
40GB isn't much for decent quality rips when you have 20+ years of CD purchases. Maybe you're young and have yet to understand just how big collections grow over time. My ripped music is creeping towards 150GB, and I still haven't got anywhere near the end of my CD collection. Why not just use CDs? Convenience. Having my library act as a huge jukebox is far better than having to hunt out particular CDs depending upon my mood. When you get married, or have a serious girlfriend, you'll find you have even more music to deal with.
Of course nobody would buy $6,000 at one time just to fill an ipod, but over time people who love music will spend that much money over time. My wife and I have bought about 500 in the last decade. At $12 each, they would have cost $6,000 total. We didn't buy it all at once, we bought 4 CDs a month for a decade. Even though our whole music collection is only about 30gb, but I wouldn't feel bad about owning a larger ipod because buying music is about discovering and enjoying new things. If I only had a 30gb ipod, it wouldn't have room to add the new albums I find in the future.
Of course no one pays $7,000 or $48,000 for a library of music all at once. But it is easy to have that much media in your library if you've been building it over the course of a lifetime. I've only been seriously curating my collection for 5-7 years and have a library worth at least $3,000.
No, you probably won't fill 120GB with music, but it's very easy to fill that with video.
I'm sorry, but your argument is very poorly made.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
Guitar Hero drives much more sales than your ad agencies and your lawsuits, assholes. The funny thing is that the recording industry are beginning to attack their own kin, MTV Games!
So right! The only question is if people will realize that they can voice their opinion on this matter, and not buy stuff from these jerks. They hurt the consumers and the artists...so why are we paying their salaries?
Since you've been deemed insightful by the moderators, please elaborate on your insight about supply and demand being poorly suited. In your reply, please also bear in mind the assumptions and constraints under which supply and demand are presented in the model and the fact that the model is later used to incorporate the relaxation of the assumptions and constraints originally presented.
Huh. You sure? I mean, I always assumed "have your cake" was a euphemism for something that would certainly inhibit the edibility of the cake (or at least its deliciousness) after the fact.
Kind of like the ideal gas law.
If it was the labels 'forcing' this price down Apple's throat, it seems awfully strange that Amazon and Zune are unaffected.
Because pulling your goods from one big shop because they won't let you have your way isn't a every effective threat if that big shop has no rivals selling your goods on your terms.
As long as I still have alternatives, I could care less about the people duped into paying the Apple tax.
So that'll be that brand hatred thing you're going on about then.
An alternative to iTunes for the reasons you've stated?
Not good enough.
iTunes is 100% DRM free.
iTunes is MP4 (AAC kicks MP3's ass)
ENORMOUS track selection.
I gave up on torrents eventually. I either couldn't find what I wanted (I dunno why, but major filesharers have the absolute worst musical tastes), or there was a grand total of *two* seeds trickling out five bytes a minute combined. It's worth money to me to get exactly what I want and have it download in a few minutes.
I don't think it works like that anyway: picking up one of my only CDs i can see
20m14s = 204.2MB
if you extrapolate that to the max size of a cdr (80m/700MB) you get
80m = 807MB
comparing .wavs files to CDs is still apples to oranges, because the data is encoded in a totaly dfferent way on an audio cd (uses the red book ~= "The format is a two-channel 16-bit PCM encoding at a 44.1 kHz sampling rate per channel.") to a data cd with wav files(which may or may not be the same format as CDs) on ISO 9660.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
You can also count on temporary price increases for songs that are on American Idol that week.
Or there's the whole, "people-really-want-this-so-we-can-charge-a-premium" for it. I'm obviously no economist based on my use of hyphenated, quoted phrases to explain that which I don't understand, but there's truth to it (for whatever economic reason).
I have a huge shelf. Should I be able to get CDs to put on it for proportionally cheaper because my shelf is bigger than a while back?
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
Historically, and until recently, the labels 'owned' the spins a song got from the radio stations. Here is a decent article detailing the politics in how the labels own the spins, and therefore the content from "free" radio in spite of the fact thats its supposed to be illegal to do so.
I would happily pay for music from the early 20th century. It's hard to find, especially in high quality restoration. So if somebody goes to the trouble of collecting it, restoring it, digitizing it, and making it convenient to find and download then they deserve to make a profit.
You're welcome! There's a DONATE button just above the HUGE table. Here's the torrent.
There is a price where profit is maximized. Go too high and the sales drop eats more then the added profit per unit provides.
I'm sure this is an idea that the record labels have never considered before. Never ever.
The reason they would dare ask $1.29 for a download of a 30-year-old song like 'Barricuda' is because they think enough people are willing to pay that much that they'll make a profit on it -- and they barely have to sell any copies at all for that to happen, since the recording costs were recouped decades ago, and its constant rotation on Classic Rock radio already makes it a cash cow for them.
I don't know where you're getting this from?
The law of supply and demand is simple - and also obvious to anyone who sells on Ebay. The more people want an item, the higher the final price will be driven up. I have yet to see an example where supply/demand failed to explain the pricing of an item, except in situations where a monopoly exists (the monopoly controls the price, not demand).
As for Barracuda, yes it's old but also high in demand, so naturally the price is high. Like the PS1's Suikoden 2 which obscenely sells for $150 despite being over ten years old.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Yeah, I signed on to eMusic as well after trying out a promotion they were running in Car and Driver. I wasn't expecting them to have many artists I liked, but I was pleasantly very surprised at the selection and opted to stay. You pay a monthly fee for a fixed number of downloads .. I am paying twelve bucks for 30 downloads a month, and I have no problem finding 30 tracks each month to get my money's worth.
Also, Millisong is a site where you pay into an account, and then make purchases that deduct from that account. Very high quality MP3s, very low per-track prices, biiiiig selection.
It's not a lie. It's the truth with lossy compression.
Yes, but surely you see the flip side to that coin? Charging more of a product decreases overall sales, especially when there is no large cost for greater "production" (in this case only bandwidth). Selling 100 units at a profit of $1 each makes you 5% less money selling 140 units at a profit of 75 cents each.
I think the idea of charging a premium is much more limited to scarce resources and items where your potential buyer pool is much smaller. Here the you have a massive potential buying pool and no scarcity.
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you know, i never thought of that... This is probably why only one of my favorite band's songs have ever shown up on there, because its from the one album that was under an RIAA label. Bastards....
Stupidity only gets you so far, then you've gotta try
What's the over/under on the length of time before the labels switch back to 99 cent pricing? I'm going to guess about 3 weeks.
Roughly the amount of time it took to pull Tropicana out of its nosedive. Yes, music industry; 99 cents per song is (was) your brand.
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
I have yet to see an example where supply/demand failed to explain the pricing of an item
Wine. If you price wine too low, people assume it is crap and don't buy it. Counter-intuitively, a way to move wine can be to simply increase the price. My father-in-law did his PhD thesis on this phenomenon back in the 70s.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The other problem with demand is that it is dependent on so many factors, like popularity. On Ebay, people will pay way more than an item is worth to them just because someone else is bidding. Demand goes up temporarily based on their perceptions, most of the time of which they are unaware.
The "law" of supply and demand describe things simplistic curves and that often do not fit reality.
The economic laws referred to are not simply the the spot price of a restricted supply good will go up in the short term because demand went up. Supply and demand do not explain the economic situation because they are volatile and can often be controlled.
The law of supply and demand says that the in the short run, increased demand will drive the price up, but in the longer term, this will cause more competition and thus more production and the price will be brought back in line with costs, even go down because of increased production efficiency. The price of music on iTunes has less to do with costs than control.
Do you really believe any label with an iota of intelligence would pull all of their work from a distribution network like iTunes?
Any one label.. no. Although it isn't unthinkable if Apple get too pushy.
All the big labels, who don't particularly like iTunes telling them what to do anyway, Oh yes. Absolutely. And Apple know this.
There are now plenty of other digital download outlets only too willing to do what ever is asked of them. iTunes is a music store these days. It could only call the shots when it was the music store.
The day the last of the big labels signed up with Amazon and others was the day iTunes stopped mattering. Do you really believe that someone will ignore all the other outlets if Apple don't sell a specific track?
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
The chance that you LIKE a song decreases with the amount of music you try to listen to. If you can have 100 songs, you will pick your 100 favorites. If you have 40 gigs of music, chances are you hate most of it, the rest is for your friends or you are archiving it for humanity.
Hmmm... I don't see it that way.
You might want to listen to different music depending on your mood, get tired of a particular band or genre and "rediscover" it later, try out different bands or even genres.
I get tired of some music, and with the help of some websites (notably last.fm) I look for other music to try, like some, discard others, and keep up the cycle.
I'm amazed at the different music I've been able to discover, which I would never have heard about ten or twenty years ago, even if I had the time I have now.
So, would you say my few GBs of Tango are worthless? Sure, maybe I could delete it now, but I enjoyed it for a while. Same for pop, rock, metal, dance/techno and such... and I still haven't scratched the surface, I suspect. There's plenty of music being produced, and even more from the past 500? 1000? years I still haven't listened to (I would never have heard of say, Pachelbel's Canon, if not thanks to the Internet - you'll never hear it on an FM radio here)
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
>>>If you price wine too low, people assume it is crap and don't buy it.
You mean experts assume that. Average, ordinary people enjoy getting a bargain because they know it tastes just as good & gets you just as drunk.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Isn't this basically the business model of Napster? A quick search of their website reveals the following marketing text:
Napster maintains the largest on-demand streaming and MP3 catalog - over 7 million songs - so you don't have to. Never download another file or rip another CD unless you want to. With Napster, you can easily access your music 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
for which they charge $13/month.
Sounds nice. Can I move it to my portable player? Does it have unreasonable DRM? And, most important of all: will it be legal everywhere I use it?
Sadly, that's the highest barrier of entry - the stupid incompatibility of laws.
My father has bought perfectly legal Norton software, and has been told it's "illegal" in my country because he didn't "properly import" it, so it would have been cheaper had he pirated it.
If I suscribe to Napster, I'm SURE that AGADU (the local RIAA) won't recognize it as valid, just as RIAA doesn't recognize allofmp3 as valid.
And what if I cross a border? Say, I'm offered a job in a neighbouring country (Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay have some trade and work agreements - called MERCOSUR) - will it be legal there? Flying on a plane?
Stuck between paying for an "I'm not sure if it will be legal" and probably not complete catalog, and an "I'm sure it's not legal but nobody cares" model, I'll obviously choose the second. Please give me the carrot AND the stick, and I'll buy your "legal" media.
It's not as if music is dying in my country (Uruguay) - the Pilsen Rock festival gathers 1/20th of the POPULATION, and they're planning a huge mega-concert for 140.000 people daily on a 3.000.000 inhabitant country.
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
>>>There is no "supply" for digital music, it is effectively infinite.
A common and false statement. The hard drives used for storage are finite as is the coal that generates the electricity to run the servers. So the supply of digital music is limited by the Hardware and Electricity costs. It is more accurate to say, "Digital music is plentiful, but still a limited supply."
>>>The other problem with demand is that it is dependent on so many factors, like popularity
Non-relevant. Demand is demand, and the whys don't matter. Maybe the customers are all high on LSD and think the Ebay Bid button is a munchie dispenser - it doesn't matter. What matters is that demand is high, and that drives-up the price.
>>>The "law"
It's a theory not a law, just like Newton's Theory about Gravity. (Yes I know it was misnamed Newton's Law, but it's really just a theory, and it has been proven wrong over time although it still has useful purposes.)
>>>the supply for a particular song is a monopoly (from the record company)...The price of music on iTunes has less to do with costs than control.
I disagree. Yes it's a monopoly, but even the monopoly can not stop the process of aging. Songs decrease in value over time, just like any depreciating good. Sometimes a song will briefly spike in demand, such as when an old 80s song appears in a new videogame, but for the most part Old == low demand == cheaper price. Itunes new pricing scheme was meant to reflect that reality: higher prices for higher demand songs; lower prices for lower demand songs.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
You have 16GB of contact and calendar information?
Just a thought but there are many CDs that have 25-30 track on them cuase the artist decided to talk or make an intro before the next track...
they can be 5 seconds to a 1 minute long, but are generally not MUSIC per say...
should these not fall under the 69c track... or less?
- Tied to one portable media player
Dude, even the frickin Zune plays itunes AAC tracks.
Not 100% DRM free, or even close
Please go find me some DRM music on itunes. Apple has claimed that the entire music catalog is now all available sans DRM. This claim if true should be easy enough to back up, so I'm going to need you to provide some examples.
A post like yours, just makes you look like a zealot. Enable some serious discourse.
Anything the labels do to harm music sales at the iTMS will hurt them much more than Apple. The iTunes Music Store makes almost no profit for Apple. About 70% of the revenue (not net--the sales price) of each song goes directly to the labels. Apple makes enough to cover expenses, but mostly benefits by selling iPods and iPhones. Apple could run the iTMS at a loss for the rest of time and still come out way ahead on their electronic product sales. Heck they could shut it down completely and as long as music is sold somewhere in a digital format, they'll do ok. Amazon's music store for instance makes it easy put the music you buy there onto your iPod. And let's face it, some percentage of customers who turn away from the iTMS will just pirate instead.
Not that I wouldn't put this past the labels. They have already demonstrated the ability to make dumb decisions.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I think you're assuming (and Gerzel below) that the "supply" is bits. The supply actually is the song Barracuda by Heart; you can supply any other songs you want, but there's a monopoly on that one. So they price accordingly.
Frankly, it's kind of amazing what drives sales. Guitar Hero is one of the latest weird ones, but back when GTA: Vice City came out, all the songs from the soundtrack were big again. If Apple puts a song in a commercial, it's suddenly huge.
I wonder if record companies really hate that. I know that part of their business is tied up in marketing and the notion that you *have to* go through them if you want to get famous.
Sorry, I just don't think that makes sense. I get where you're trying to go with it, though. But people don't buy THE song, they buy a COPY of the song (or, depending on who you ask, a license to play the song). The thing you're supplying is a copy. Copies are unlimited.
The economic theories involving supply and demand are based on scarcity. Trying to apply them to a resource that isn't scarce is like trying to apply them to a market with infinite customers. The math just doesn't add up. The economic theories that apply here are more about pricing and volume, where the production of the goods is a minor factor.
None of that doesn't prevent companies from being stupid, though. They can do things that will result in them making less profit and it still doesn't disprove the economic theories.
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ITMS is one incredibly large carrot on a stick for the music industry - it has a huge amount of sales. They're not in the industry to be stupid but to make money - they make money for nothing on ITMS. I mean, think about it. What is the record label doing when a song gets put on ITMS? The only answer I can think of is collecting the money.
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
But the labels said that iTMS's flat pricing restricted them from dropping prices! You mean that Apple's STILL keeping them from dropping their prices even after this? Or was that just a sham so that they could raise their "wholesale" price to Apple if they wanted? Three guesses and the first two don't count.
"Stupid! Stupid stupid stupid stupid! I touched the hot wire right there - I'm an idiot!"
You mean experts assume that. Average, ordinary people enjoy getting a bargain because they know it tastes just as good & gets you just as drunk.
Not really. I'm definitely no expert on wine. But if I see a bottle priced at $5, I tend to steer clear of it unless I can get a sample or a recommendation from someone I trust. Wine is an area where there are vast amounts of different producers of the same products. Compare the number of merlots in your local liquor store to the number of vodkas.
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128 kbps = 0.367370969 petabits per century [Google '128kbps in petabits per century'. How cool is THAT?]
So, according to that calculation, if you listened to 128kbps mp3s from the second you were born until the day you died, you would fail to fill up half a petabyte's worth of storage. I have no doubt that there already exists this much music in digital form. Thus, our supply of digital entertainment (not necessarily GOOD entertainment...) is, for all reasonable intents and purposes, infinite.
I just browsed through Apple's recommendations for me. Out of all hundred odd tracks across all genres, there was precisely one 69c track, and precisely one $1.29 track.
Economic laws are derived via axiomatic deduction, much like mathematics. The law of demand is not difficult to derive from the action axiom - men act, ie, apply means toward ends - with valid and sound deductive argument. Unlike mathematics, though, the action axiom is a priori true (as opposed to geometry axioms which are stated to lay a foundation) so you could say economics has a *stronger* foundation than math.
I would challenge you to put forward any argument that the law of demand is invalid (first you should probably learn what it states).
What you may have meant to say is that forecasting models seem to be poorly suited for explaining most economic climates. I'm with you there. Why they don't change is mostly related to politics (the same could be said for medicine and many other disciplines).
NOBODY is going to spend $6,000 on their music collection. Well I suppose SOME people might, but certainly nobody that I know would ever even think about paying that much for something they can get for free (and at the same, or near-same quality). Only a dollar per song sounds pretty reasonable, but if you have a 160GB iPod, filling it up will cost $48,000! $48,000?! Just think of what that kind of money can mean to somebody. Pay off the credit card debt. Get a new car. Remodeling. Any number of major things.
Round down the price of a CD to ten bucks and you are looking at 600 CDs. I have a lot more than that, and that isn't including vinyl, paid for downloads, or other mediums. I still regularly buy CDs, even though I can get them for free, either by downloading or making copies of other people's music. I don't feel weird about it.
I'd love to see a Guitar Hero made with songs that the RIAA didn't control.
Ermm, sorry, but the hits also drive the sales of GH, not only GH new sales of old music.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
They didn't have to pull their music-- all they had to do was refuse to allow Apple to sell music without DRM, and they'd probably lose out to Amazon eventually. Did you notice that the "variable pricing" is taking effect at the same time that DRM is going away? That's because that was the trade: DRM for "variable pricing" (i.e. higher prices on some tracks)
I'll grant you that the electricity that powers the servers where you purchase your digital music tracks from is indeed limited, but I would hardly qualify HDD space as limited in the same manner. Or are you trying to imply that if Amazon wants to sell 500 copies of Weird Al's latest album, they need to have it duplicated 500 times on their server?
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
The price that Apple paid for becoming popular, offering .99 a track music, was first copy protection, insisted on by the labels. Then, the music industry insisted on variable pricing. Apple refused, and worse, went public in calling for DRM-free music. In retribution, Amazon and other sellers got DRM-free music, and cheaply. The intent was to injure Apple. It didn't, really, but finally, Apple uncled and gave up on variable pricing.
Now the Apple hate boys blame Apple for that, while the labels disappear. Look around on Amazon. They've changed their pricing to conform. It's not exact, but it closely follows the same pattern. So, while you're all righteous about Apple charging more, ask what the labels are doing, and why Amazon is getting some tracks for less than Apple has to pay. Why would that be?
MP3 is so 1995. Get with it man.
I'm a 2000 man.
Yes, but surely you see the flip side to that coin? Charging more of a product decreases overall sales, especially when there is no large cost for greater "production" (in this case only bandwidth). Selling 100 units at a profit of $1 each makes you 5% less money selling 140 units at a profit of 75 cents each.
Sure, but when you sell 100 units @ $1 profit and then drop the price again, you'll only have to sell 7 to make more profit than if you didn't, and due to the price drop you may even get more people to buy the product than originally would have bought it at 75 cents profit.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Unfortunately, you've neglected an extremely crucial factor. Demand can be fleeting, especially in this case. You're assuming it's constant or drops off a lot less than I believe is likely in this case. The same people who would have purchased those additional 40 units may now instead purchase a different song from whatever new game has come out. And they may be from your competitor. This is part of where the music biz has tried to help cover their bases by getting a few near-monopolies. But it's still a major factor, since in reality people spend their money on all sorts of things, not just music. So the money they might have spent on your song could well go to something else because they don't want to pay your price. Then by the time you decide to drop your price, they're not interested anymore and you still don't get their money.
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What is a good alternative?
Sorry, I just don't think that makes sense. I get where you're trying to go with it, though. But people don't buy THE song, they buy a COPY of the song (or, depending on who you ask, a license to play the song). The thing you're supplying is a copy. Copies are unlimited.
The economic theories involving supply and demand are based on scarcity. Trying to apply them to a resource that isn't scarce is like trying to apply them to a market with infinite customers. The math just doesn't add up. The economic theories that apply here are more about pricing and volume, where the production of the goods is a minor factor.
None of that doesn't prevent companies from being stupid, though. They can do things that will result in them making less profit and it still doesn't disprove the economic theories.
So your argument is that people would just as gladly pay for another song, or in fact for random bits, because they actually pay for the copy, not the music. Maybe you should ask yourself why the music industry is rich, and you are not.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
I stand corrected. Came over here to post my findings, and you've already found something as well.
I just saw a similar article today on ars technica.
It looks like other music services are affected by this as well. From the article this line sums it up, "...pricing changes that the labels have managed to negotiate into their contracts with digital music distributors." The blame is squarely on the record labels in this case.
NOBODY is going to spend $6,000 on their music collection.
I did, over time. Pick up a CD here and there, marry a woman with a similar-sized collection, and next think you know you're ripping over 400 CDs. My MP3-only collection is about 30GB.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
FYI-
http://www.electronista.com/articles/09/04/07/amazon.mp3.raises.prices/
Screw them. I used a unique email address to sign up with them a few years back (emusic@mydomain), and just recently I've started getting spam for that address. I don't care if they sold it or were simply careless with their database. They get no business from me and I tell everyone I know to stay far away. Fuck 'em.
Same goes for Buy.com, Guinness (yes, the beer - which was even more egregious because THEY spammed me at a specific and valid email address that I've never given out), and others.
Poor strawman. He never stood a chance.
Let me know when you actually want to try to address MY argument.
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Increasing the price makes more money per track sold, but results in fewer tracks sold. You can create a graph to represent each of those statements, and when you multiply the two graphs, the result is a graph which has a peak, which is where the track should be priced since that will make more money.
If Apple were smart, iTunes would be finding that price for each song individually, and the music industry would not complain since there is no price they can sell each track at which results in more profit.
Average, ordinary people enjoy getting a bargain because they know it tastes just as good & gets you just as drunk.
Certainly Wal-Mart and Trader Joes and the like are trying to change the situation with their decent, low-cost wine (e.g. "Two-Buck Chuck") - but in general, the wine markets are wonky and do not follow any kind of a traditional demand curve.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Awfully strange unless you have been paying attention to the labels' loud and public complaints about Apple having too much power over them, leading to situations where they do things like:
- allow Amazon to go DRM free first at the same price point as ITMS DRMed versions
- get MS to pay them $1 per Zune and publicly complain Apple won't.
If you haven't even been paying attention to the topic, don't bag on other people's comments.
The labels have been proclaiming for years that Apple is reaping huge profits selling iPods which are only valuable because of THEIR content, and done everything in their power to boost their share. If you think any of this price increase is going to APple, you're dreaming.
When will these idiot marketers get it through their head that I don't want to be deceived! I AM WILLING TO PAY 1 EXTRA CENT ON EVERY PRODUCT simply in order to avoid the "99" syndrome. Price things evently. $.70, $1, $1.30, none of this .x9 crap, please make it stop! It hurts my brain and makes me so angry. You can MAKE MORE MONEY if you just round up! Why can't we all just get along?
Since you have been deemed insightful by the moderators please elaborate on your insight about the reason why I should elaborate on my insight because I have been deemed insightful.
why not offer songs in .wav or flac format ?
http://hdtracks.com/
Never mind that experts also have quite a bit of data and research to back up their claims.
Indeed. Oops a typo.
For you perhaps.
MP4 vs MP3...how many people have good enough ears + speakers + sound cards to notice the difference? Also the quality of the encoding and source itself can have much greater impact on sound quality.
Emusic wins on price.
Also I'd like to note that the selections are different. There are tracks available on Itunes that are not on Emusic, and there are tracks available on Emusic that are not available on Itunes.
Can you download from Itunes w/o using the Itunes software? IE can you take firefox, granted with Java and Flash enabled, and use Itunes? You can do that with Emusic. Is Itunes available for linux(Seriously I've not checked in a couple of months)?
Sometimes they have, but not always: http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2008/01/expensive_wine_tastes_better.php
"Clearly this woman (along with 90% of other Americans over 30) is eating too much food. Cut back the intake."
Well, she's Canadian. And she is probably close to 60. But I've found most Europeans to be just as unhealthy in their lifestyle. Most of the continent smokes like a chimney, and the English think exercise means to not use the remote control to change the channel.
I'm just sayin' that you're living in a large glass home to be throwing stones like that.
There's also the warm, fuzzy feelings you get from supporting artists you care about. However, the latest business tactics employed by Apple, Amazon and *specially* the RIAA have gone a long way to remove that as well.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
The music industry LOVES piracy. It allows them to beg "will you please pay our inflated prices to cover the cost of your friends' piracy?"
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
A common and false statement. The hard drives used for storage are finite as is the coal that generates the electricity to run the servers. So the supply of digital music is limited by the Hardware and Electricity costs. It is more accurate to say, "Digital music is plentiful, but still a limited supply."
Which is why he said "effectively infinite". It's not technically infinite, but for one copy of the music on their servers, they can serve it to far more people than will ever attempt to download them.
I disagree. Yes it's a monopoly, but even the monopoly can not stop the process of aging. Songs decrease in value over time, just like any depreciating good. Sometimes a song will briefly spike in demand, such as when an old 80s song appears in a new videogame, but for the most part Old == low demand == cheaper price. Itunes new pricing scheme was meant to reflect that reality: higher prices for higher demand songs; lower prices for lower demand songs.
What you've suggested should be happening is what Jobs promised. There's one problem: that older songs aren't getting cheaper. They've mostly stayed at $0.99, while popular songs have gone up in price. There are very few songs that have dropped in price, despite claims from Apple that the opposite was true. This goes towards the idea that it's about control and not "supply and demand", which is difficult to apply to a resource which is EFFECTIVELY infinite.
That's why there are password protected torrent sites. They can give you WHAT CD you want. :D
Wow. Steve Jobs vows lower prices and then disappears. I guess the RIAA is closer to the mob than we thought.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
ZOMG!!!111!1!1! You pirate! No, actually about 40% of my iPod is pictures (remember it can do that?!), 15% is music (for me about 5% is iTunes, 10% is stuff from my CDs), 10% is contact information and calendars, 15% is podcast (I drive two hours one way to work), the rest is just junk files from iWork and stuff. I have about 70% of my 160GB iPod filled.
160Gb * 70% * 10% = 11.2Gb. That's quite a lot of "contact information". Of course you can just say that it's really porn, but then I won't believe you either, because... well, I mean, just 11Gb of porn? ~
Curiously "Barracuda" very closely resembles part of Led Zeppelin's "Achilles Last Stand." I see Amazon and other places laugh and talk about the LedZep sound or Bonham style drumming, but its really close to outright imitation. However, I would also not be surprised if LedZep ripped off these riffs from someone else. I have become sadly disillusioned with the musicians I loved as a teenager, after already being disgusted with how the public was ripped off from CD sales in the past. I heard today Zappa's widow's lawyers are bullying acts who cover him. Sad sad sad
emusic.com is another viable alternative to Itunes.
-No DRM
-MP3 Format
-Large Selection(Though it is true they tend to have better alternative selections and fewer name-brands)
->$1 per track. (I pay $0.21 per)
There is life in music beyond what is shoveled through the pop radio and TV ads.
As soon as they let me buy a-la-cart they'll get some of my business. The last time I checked, the minimum was still $10 a month. And I don't spend anywhere near that much on music.
Last time I checked I couldn't see their catalog until I signed up, either, but it's been more than a year since I looked.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
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