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)."

Comments

Re:Media is overpriced, pay-per-unit model is dyin

[cripeon]

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.

thejokerswild82's 2cents worth...

[thejokerswild82]

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?????

Higher prices mean fewer sales.

[MikeFM]

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.