iTunes tunes: finally, a decent price
p2pnet news view | P2P | Music:- Finally, someone has arrived at a fair price for iTunes downloads ———
——— $2.60 for an iTunes gift card, which normally retails for $200 per card.
But No, Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music haven’t finally come to their senses, opening their catalogues and lowering wholesale prices so the few online companies which still want to sell corporate crap can do so with some hope of getting punters to buy it.
Instead, “here in China there’s legitimate download sites and there’s mp3.baidu.com, but if you’ve ever wanted to straggle the fence between legality and piracy, there’s a way to do that too,” says Shanghailist, quoting Outdustry.
“Taobao has long been harboring many iTunes store gift voucher hackers, selling $200 USD (1,368 RMB) gift cards for as little as 18RMB,” it says.
Outdustry says the owner of the Taobao shop, “told us frankly that the gift card codes are created using key-generators. He also said that he paid money to use the hackers’ service”.
The story continues »»»
Half a year ago, when they started the business, the price was around 320 RMB for 200 USD card, then more people went into this business and the price went all the way down to 18 RMB per card, “but we make more money as the amount of customers is growing rapidly.”
“The hackers are based in China, but I don’t know if they do the same thing in eBay”, the Taobao shopkeeper said.”Most of our customers use iTunes store for music, then Apple applications (bear in mind that the iPhone is only available in the grey market in mainland China) and films. iPod games are least popular.”
So, adds Outdustry, “this gives Apple a depressing price point for its iTunes services in an otherwise unfathomable online music market: $2.60 (18RMB) for $200USD worth of products.”
Shanghailist – The semi-not-really-legal way to purchase from iTunes: Taobao, March 11, 2009
Outdustry – The Chinese iTunes Gift Voucher Trick, March 10, 2009
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March 12th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
Well, at least iTunes has a chance to see what people actually think their songs are worth. But isn’t most of iTunes’ stuff American? I guess I shouldn’t say much; I’ve never used the service. If that is the case, however, then I would imagine the chinese perceive our music as much less valuable than their own. What if these same people were to open up shop here in the US? Would the price stay at $2.60/gift card?
This particular case, however, doesn’t shine a very good light. It’s not straddling the legal line: it’s clearly illegal to forge iTunes gift certificates, for the same reason it’s illegal to forge a cheque. Both are documents representing value. If I ran a music store, and I sold gift certificates, and someone came along and created gift certificates that I didn’t authorize, I would be very upset. It’s theft, in the material sense of the word, even if it’s committed electronically.
Compare this hypothetical scenario: McDonald’s starts selling gift certificates. These certificates are calculated using a proprietary algorithm, and sell for $50 each at the restaurant. Someone discovers the algorithm to create the codes on the gift certificates, and makes $50,000 worth of certificates for the cost of a CPU and a few hours of processing time. He sells these codes for $5. For every single certificate forged, McDonald’s directly lost $50 (or at least they lost the wholesale cost of $50 worth of food and the labor used to create it).
In both cases, the certificates are created digitally. In both cases, they are probably used digitally (at McDonald’s, the clerk probably punches in the certificate number when accepting the certificate, but the net effect is the same: a digitally verified certificate.). In fact, the only difference between the hypothetical scenario and the real one (other than numbers) is that in one case, the product being sold is digital copies of songs, and in the other, the product being sold is food.