Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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.
They couldn't even manage to put the logo right side up either.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Except that the whole "sell the crap for cheap" part is missing.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
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.
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!
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?
"Your favorite artist" sees just about zilch from CD sales, unless they're totally independent. If you want to support them, go see them in concert.
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
"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 $1,000 putting music on my iPod, or I could just take it. Hmmmmmm."
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
The value of 10days of music versus 20days is not twice as much. This should be reflected. If I listen to 3hours of music a day with 10,000 or 100,000songs my enjoyment only increases marginally.
If you think about it like a radio station it makes more sense. E-radio stations are charged per song they play. That price is based on number of listeners. So with an infinite number of songs available (like a radio station) paying to broadcast to an audience of 1 (me). It would probably cost me something like 2$ 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.
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.
This is why gift cards are a bad idea. They instantly made my $75 of gift cards worth about $50.
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!
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.
Apple didn't fool the press. This is being reported as "Apple raises prices 30%".
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)
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?
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.
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.
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.
"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?
Being arrogantly ignorant makes you wrong.
Being humbly ignorant makes you tentatively wrong.
Being ignorant deliberately to incite strong reactions makes you a troll.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
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.
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).
If "your favorite artist" is signed to a major label, or to an imprint of a major label, then he/she/they is/are in permanent debt slavery. Neither album sales nor concert ticket sales nor t-shirt sales nor anything else will remedy that; the outlay for concert tours comes from the label just like the outlay for recording, album production, distribution, etc.
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.....
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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"...
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
Does she get to tell you how to live your life now too?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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)-
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.