Universal, Sony Cutting Prices on Downloaded Music

Don Symes writes "Sony Music and Universal appear to be getting ready to allow downloads of singles for $.99 and albums for $9.99 without crippleware or restrictions on personal copying/burning." Another semi-interesting piece submitted by several people is this propaganda from the recording industry. 2.8 million copyright-infringing CD-R's were seized in the U.S. last year (9 million world-wide); from that the IFPI extrapolates that 950 million copyright-infringing CD-R's were actually sold, world-wide. How do you get from 9 million to 950 million? Mostly hand-waving .

I'd download them!

[night_flyer]

But the cable company set a lower bandwidth cap...

I'd pay for music

[LinuxCumShot]

... no wait, i won't.

Re:HA!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yuh huh, they can pay you to take the files.

The upside for the labels:

[CaseyB]

The one advantage of having lower $0.99 "per track" charges, is that once the artists' royalty percentage is rounded, it equals zero.

Record Company Board Meeting:

[Dr. Bent]

"Here's an idea: Maybe if we give them something they actually want, they'll pay us for it."

"Wow...you think so? Well, let's give it a shot. Can't be any worse than that MiniDisc fiasco."

Slashdot / MP3 Comment Generator

[Geeyzus]

Let me save you the time of reading all the hypocritical comments, just read this one.

"This is a great start, but I'm not paying [current price] for a song/album. Maybe I'd consider [current price / 2], but it would have to be available in [some other format] and at [current sampling rate * 2]. And even then, I wouldn't pay without getting [a CD / liner notes / etc]."

99 cents a song is a steal. Let's figure there are 3 good songs on a CD nowadays (generous assumption). That's 3 bucks for a CD's worth of good songs. As opposed to 15+ dollars in the store.

But I'm sure people can justify not using this service anyway. Hell, I will admit that if I want some song, I'll probably get it off of KaZaA (I don't really listen to much music nowadays). But I'm not gonna criticize the system, I think it is perfect, they are biting the bullet and offering us a great alternative to stealing music. If this fails, it's not the record company's fault.

Mark

Re:$.99 is still too much

[Ephro]

Sorry second line should be:

Supporting them now is like caving to the first offer from a street vendor in Thailand.

Re:Good Grief

[CaseyB]

The seriously ironic thing is that millions of dollars of the money that is spent on the legitimate music industry is "channeled into the drugs trade".

How many VH1 "Behind the Music" specials have driven _that_ point home?

Re:These files need to be CD quality

[Citizen of Earth]

personally if im going to pay for something I want a solid object in my mitts, a physical CD, liner notes, pictures, etc....

I think you're dreaming. There is no way that you could ever talk them into selling you a physical disc with high-quality recordings on it, liner notes, etc. There just isn't a feasible business case for it.

Re:Use the Rhino Problem to extrapolate

[Asprin]

Neat, but flawed.

Here's how a physicist measures (for example) the area of a circle:

Take the circle who's area you want to measure (diameter D, for example) and draw a square around it (side length D). Now shoot bullets at the whole bloomin' mess so that they are evenly (randomly) distributed over the figures. The ratio of the number of bullets that landed inside the square to those that landed inside the circle and that should proportional to the ratio of the areas of the square (easy: A=D*D=D^2) and the unknown circle. In other words,

Acircle = D^2 * [# in circle]/[# in square]

From this, we can conclude that the RIAA shot bullets at their customers, proving that anyone who isn't a pirate is now dead.

Q.E.D.

Re:This will prove it

[ryanvm]

I had to face the facts: I was stealing music. A few of my friends asked me to justify what I was doing, and I couldn't justify it. I was stealing music.

Wow - your friends staged a Napster intervention?

Don't buy music or you'll support terrorists!

[Evaner]

I don't know if it's an American or Canadian commercial, but there is a commercial that shows how buying drugs supports terrorists.

Paying for music means that a certain percentange (remember, zero's a percent!) goes to the artist, and a certian percentage of that (100 is a percent) is spent on that artist's crippling drug addiction. Therefore, Paying for music supports terrorists!

I always make sense (or cents... depending)!