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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)."
There is no competition between different labels to sell the same product (song)
TFS mentions tracks in the public domain. Anyone can sell those tracks - how do you explain the pricing there? That can't be the Label's bullying poor defenceless Apple.
You can buy your music from amazon and just import it into itunes. iTunes is a database for you to organize your collection. iTunes music store is the store.
captcha: monogamy
As I'm currently researching a tangential issue for a journal article right now, I have found numerous cases and pronouncements from Congress that if the song file is transferred (as distinguished from streamed), it is a public distribution, not a public performance.
Thus, ASCAP should not be implicated when you're selling tracks (as distinguished from streaming radio).
Yes, I know from a technical standpoint there isn't much difference between streaming and transferring a 4MB MP3 file with speeds the way they are now over the net.
However, it basically breaks down to: a streamed MP3 is "performed" and the "performance" is sent over the net. However, a merely transferred MP3 is sent as a piece of data that is meant for later performance.
Think of it as the difference between sending a VHS recording of a play you produced and transmitting a live show over the airwaves.