Apple may hike iTunes prices
p2p news / p2pnet: Apple’s Steve Jobs may raise the cost of his already grossly over-priced digital music downloads.
“For several months now, the record industry has become more and more vocal over the issue of pricing on the iTunes Music Store,” says BetaNews. “On Wednesday, the first indications of a possible variable pricing structure coming to iTunes became apparent.”
The post quotes the Wall Street Journal as reporting that EMI Music ceo Alain Levy says he’s spoken with Jobs over the issue. “There is a common understanding that we will have to come to a variable pricing structure,” the WSJ had Levy stating. “The issue is when.
“There is a case for superstars to have a higher price.”
According to Levy, the change would probably occur within the next 12 months. “Apple’s contracts with many of the record labels expire in 2006 and are currently up for negotiation,” says BetaNews.
iTunes, billed as a music service, is actually a brilliantly conceived, self-funding promotional-cum-download vehicle for iPod.
At the moment, the Apple Faithful, a tiny handful compared to the vast numbers of people who log onto the p2p nets every day, pay $1 per download. However, “the record industry would like to charge more for bigger artists while dropping the price on smaller acts,” says BetaNews. “Most critics view the demand as an affront to raise prices across the board, while only lowering the price on acts that very few listeners will purchase.”
Every day, more and more people are ignoring iTunes, the only viable corporate online download ’service’. Rather, they’re logging onto the p2p networks where instead of the paltry, cookie cutter corporate catalogues, a vast, mind-numbing range of old and new, corporate and indie, downloads are shared among hundreds of millions of people, all labelled criminals and thieves by Vivendi Universal, Warner Music, EMI Group and Sony BMG, even though nothing has been stolen.
The Big Four ignore the reality that the ‘thieves’ would happily pay a fair price 20 cents say? for each download. Most online music lovers will not, however, pay a $1 and up for files which are no more than shrunken versions of tracks that have already been bought and paid for through one or other of the billions of CDs and DVDs being marketed by Organized Music.
The labels have been ripping off their customers for decades. Now, for the first time in history, music lovers have a way of protesting. They’re letting the Net and the p2p networks do their talking.
If Apple does indeed boost its prices, even the Apple Faithful may head for the p2p networks, and that may in turn force Organized Music to change its tune.
Tired of being treated like a criminal? They depend on you, not the other way around. Don’t buy their ‘product’. Do bug your local political representatives. Use emails, snail-mail, phone calls, faxes, IM, stop them in the street, blog. And if you’re into organizing, organize petitions, organize demonstrations and then turn up on your local political rep’s doorstep, making sure you’ve contacted your local tv/radio station/newspaper in advance.
See:-
BetaNews – iTunes Tracks May Increase in Price, November 16, 2005
November 17th, 2005 at 4:53 pm
Wow. Next time try to not point out your obvious bios in your first sentence. That’s bad writing and very bad journalism. I’m guessing that you are not making a lot of money writing articles which is why you think that 20 cents a song is a reasonable price. Please substantiate your facts and figures. This whole article reeks of being written by a high school student.
November 17th, 2005 at 5:03 pm
yay for allofmp3.com!
November 17th, 2005 at 5:03 pm
hmmm, a high quality track off a cd goes for ~$1, so obviously a low quality compressed format that can only be used how the korporation wants it to be used is worth more!!!
November 17th, 2005 at 5:23 pm
Yay!
Face it. Apple is now part of the problem.
November 17th, 2005 at 5:45 pm
ignorant troll …
November 17th, 2005 at 6:49 pm
Why yes, the article might be biased. Is that a crime? I guess only articles that are biased in favor of the government or cartels are the only bias you prefer. In that case, watch TV or listen to the radio. There is plenty of information biased toward the cartels in the lamescream media.
I want articles that point out what the average person thinks is fair. I would be willing to pay 20 cents for a song so long that it is not infected with DRM and is of reasonable quality. ~20 per song would be enough to geerate a good profit for both artist and distributor. However generous profit is not what the cartels are looking for. They want to take as much as they can suck from an average person.
November 17th, 2005 at 7:18 pm
yeh jon. don’t give your personal details away like that. hehehe
November 17th, 2005 at 9:34 pm
If you think about it though, iTunes IS OVERPRICED. If iTunes already charges 99 cents for a song and that particular album has 17 songs, that would mean i would cost me $16.83 to buy the whole album online through iTunes. If it’s a new release I can go to a store and pay around $12 for it and be able to rip/burn it as many times as I want. I think I like to second option better. So now iTunes wants to raise prices more?!? Do they really expect consumers to pay over $20 for an entire album with only limited transportability of the files? Give me a break!
November 17th, 2005 at 9:52 pm
For the record, perform this experiment :
Go and look *anywhere* at *any* news story. There’s bias there, it may not be obivious (and often it’s INTENTIONALLY not apparent.) but it will be there.
Anytime one person writes a story, it’s fed through the editor, who applies his bias in addition to any bias the original reporter may have had. That’s what you get when you ask someone else to report anything, invariably they taint the source with their world-view. The fact remains that the author has a valid point, which you can’t simply say “nice bias” and refute. Ad Hominem attacks only prove you can’t argue with facts. Granted, the substantiation is lacking in this article, so I agree with you there, however I don’t think his writing “reeks of being written by a high school student.”
A mind is like a parachute – it only works if it’s open.
Asmodeus Mictian
November 17th, 2005 at 10:37 pm
This is what I learned in my economy class, when demand goes up, prices go up, only because goods are scarce; back then when they came up with that they couldn’t even think of an electronic age.
Electronic goods are not scarce, Metallica’s …And Justice For All album’s Track 4 (One), cen be sold as an itunes song (AAC?) an unlimited number of times; so where’s the scarcity? Are they not happy with the exponential growth of their sales due to the internet and this age’s technological advances. This only shows how greedy recording labels are, like we didn’t know that one before, right?
Anyway, I do not support Digital Rihgts Management, I do not support buying goods that do not include a physical copy that I could sell later, I do not support their greed, I do not support their suing regular folks, and I totally do not support their having the upper hand. It’s up to us to turn the tables around.
Go old fashion, buy CDs, rip the tracks to mp3 or any format you like, sell the CD and recover most of your money, delet the tracks of your hard drive (yaeh right!). Just do something to protest, something that will hurt the coprporations involved.
November 18th, 2005 at 12:50 am
Any student of Economics 101 will tell you that the supply curve and the demand curve meet to determine exactly how MANY of something will sell at WHAT price. Increase the price and the demand goes down. Decrease the price and the demand goes UP.
The price times the demand equals revenue. The trick is what value to set the selling price to maximize profit. The RIAA cartel thinks higher prices will work to do this. My money says lower prices will do it.
It’s a lot like reducing taxes – there is more money to spend on product.
Doh!
November 18th, 2005 at 2:10 am
I think another thing that the major labels ignore is that consumers would also be more willing to pay for music if the actual artists got more of a fair share. It is well documented that in the current music market, very few artists who do not sell at least gold to platinum levels make enough from their recordings to really sustain themselves. (This is for major label artists, who seldom make more than 6% of the retail price). In fact, many artists end up essentially in debt to their labels, because their records do not sell.
And one wonders indeed what the justification for the prices of CD’s is. With the average retail price between $12-15 for something that the physical manufacturing seldom costs any more than 85¢, even with the value of the intellectual property contained on the disc seems vastly overpriced. Oh, and if you’re wondering where I come up with the 85¢ number, I used to broker CD manufacturing for 5 years, and worked the last 2 years at a DVD/CD manufacturer.
iTunes is the only store that has made sense to date, as it allows you to choose what songs to d/l, as opposed to paying $12 for 3 good songs, and 12 duds. And with the increase in labels trying to put copy protection on CD’s that do not allow you to copy music to your own computer, etc. (some of which are actually equivalent to malware, and all of which actually break the ISO CD standard), it makes sense to have an alternate choice.
However, for pricing to become more fair, the entire music industry would have to restructure its system of business, which is not likely to happen. They are too successful, and their superstars are too successful; the plight of artists that sell less than 400,000 records (which is the majority of recording artists) really doesn’t matter – they just become tax writeoffs for the companies.
November 18th, 2005 at 7:00 am
Apple and the cartels can hike their prices all they want. I am still not going to buy it under the present conditions.
I don’t have an iPod
I don’t have a Mac
I can’t stand DRM
I don’t think lossy files worth 99¢
I can’t trust the sellers and their DRM not to screw with my computer
Raising the price certainly isn’t going to bring me there either.
November 18th, 2005 at 8:39 am
Yep I’m in agreement with this variable pricing structure. Some may pay $1.69, others will pay $0.99, and the rest will still pay $0.00.
November 18th, 2005 at 11:00 pm
I wouldn’t click on those numbers if I were you, too fishy to risk it.
November 19th, 2005 at 3:40 am
And how is any pay service going to be able to compete with abundant free downloads?
Price increases won’t help
November 23rd, 2005 at 9:19 pm
I don’t believe this statement is true as the author stated in the article:
Every day, more and more people are ignoring iTunes…
iTunes downloads are growing all the time. This is not a service being ignored.
January 3rd, 2006 at 3:52 pm
“If you think about it though, iTunes IS OVERPRICED. If iTunes already charges 99 cents for a song and that particular album has 17 songs, that would mean i would cost me $16.83 to buy the whole album online through iTunes.”
No it would cost you $9.99 for the whole album, unless you were stupid enough to pay for each track off the album individually, which in that case, you’d deserve to pay $16.83