MP3 Download Prices to Rise? 831
OBeardedOne writes "The major music labels are in talks with music download services attempting to get them to increase the price of music downloads. " Sounds like there is division in the ranks of the music companies, but something to watch.
illegal trust (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:True Colors? (Score:2, Interesting)
Prices (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Nice link.... (Score:4, Interesting)
mp3s? (Score:2, Interesting)
Illegal? (Score:5, Interesting)
How to eliminate MP3. (Score:2, Interesting)
raise the price til no one will buy them. Ta-DA! no more MP3s!
I still think this would be a more permanent solution though:
no more music piracy! [popealien.com]
Re:True Colors? (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course, you'll probably be long dead before the copyright on any high-quality digital recordings runs out, so it doesn't help you much.
Can't be done (Score:5, Interesting)
Currently on iTunes a whole album costs $9.99, now I can walk into a music store and get the actual CD for $14.99.
Personally, if its only five bucks, I'd much rather have the CD. You get a pernament backup, the song lyrics and all of the other extras.
If you buy it on iTunes, you have to make sure to burn it yourself or lose it forever, and you don't get the liner notes etc.
Now, if the price per song increases, I'm guessing that the price of an album would increase as well. So that brings the price of buying the album online very close to the price of buying it from a brick and mortar store. So the arugment for buying online is even smaller.
It will be interesting to see what happens here.
comparing to ringtones (Score:5, Interesting)
This of course is insane. 2 or 3 dollars for a ringtone out of my tiny cel phone speaker is barely even something you can call a song.
Anyway, that's the logic behind it. Ringtones don't target people who want music. They target people who need to be hip and with the pop culture, so clearly people behind this are missing things.
Re:Link to CNN article (Score:5, Interesting)
lol!. I guess for them it costs more than 65 cents to make a copy of a 4MB file and upload it to servers? This is utter crap. They actually expect us to believe that a digital version of a song is more expensive than it's CD version? Not that it is for us now, but if they raise prices...
higher than 99-cents and i'm out (Score:5, Interesting)
Since iTMS came to Canada I just spend the 99-cents (that's about 82-cents US, by the way) -- it's much quicker, easier and instantly satisfying.
But if they bumped it up to, say $1.20 per song -- I'll probably go find me an eMule client -- not that much more money, but psychologically 99-cents seems negligable. Above a dollar? That's real money.
Sam
Exactly. And Jobs says... (Score:2, Interesting)
Jobs knows that if you charge $.99 for a song, people who round up will say "A dollar for a song? And no lawsuits? Not bad..." People who round down will think "These things are almost free" and think they're getting $1.00 off every time they download.
You push that extra few cents, and people stop doing that magic rounding trick. Now, because it's $1.09, I'm gonna take a wild guess any say the same people who round
Re:My download music prices DOUBLED the last month (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyways, I don't see what's the point of using places like that. You're not actually paying the artist or record lablel. You might as well get your music from usenet and P2P.
Rhapsody (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Can't be done (Score:3, Interesting)
Getting stuff online is easier. It's faster. And, even if it's by a few cents, it's cheaper. I've spent over $300 in the iTMS and my iPod's got plenty of room left (for my "other" musics), to me it's a great deal and I can find stuff that's not at my local music stores without leaving my chair.
You mention "pernament backup" when you buy from the Brick and Mortar store, but how easily do CDs get destroyed?
Funny, I thought prices should DROP... (Score:4, Interesting)
I know that not everyone wants every track, but when you're getting it in a lower quality format and at your own expense/time (bandwidth/time taken to download) $1 is a bit of a rip off.
If anything, the price should be dropping to $0.50 or $0.75. That'd actually encourage people like me to use these online services. And you'd think the music industry would like it because it's less physical content they have to manufacture and ship out to stores.
Hiking the prices just goes to show people that they can't trust the music industry, and that any trust that was fostered was misplaced.
Re:Illegal? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:www.allofmp3.com (Score:2, Interesting)
Look, Slashbots, if you want to spend your money supporting Russian crime syndicates, that's just great. Please post you home address so somebody who lost his kneecaps over this site knows where to get a new pair.
Hmm... criticising Russian mafia... better post Anonymously...
Anyway, swerving back on topic, the part of the article that caught my eye was this:
One suggestion is that labels want to introduce variable pricing - so they can charge more for top selling tracks.
You know what? I'm all for it... if it means they are willing to discount the less-popular stuff in exchange. Then people who want to pay four bucks a song for the latest "boy band" can do so, and I can get all my favorite fucked-up indie stuff on the cheap. It's win-win!
This week, I set foot in a record store for the first time in months. New CD's cost more than a lot of film DVD's now! Eighteen bucks!? For last year's Liz Phair album!? I don't think so. When I think about the fact that I was in a "budget" warehouse, I shudder to think what the mall stores are charging. Even the used CD's at this join were occasionally as high as twelve dollars each... Making the iTunes Music Store the cheapest way in town for me to get some albums. (Well... apart from supporting organized crime families, anyway.) I'm not at all surprised the labels want to haggle for a better deal.
I dont buy cd's.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, Im gonna pay MORE on a digital download. Where "distribution" can be almost cost-less. Sure. Uh-huh.
Re:True Colors? (Score:4, Interesting)
Unless, of course, it is protected with a copy protection mechanism. Then copying per se wouldn't be illegal, but breaking the copy protection (which is necessary in order to copy it) AFAIK still is (IANAL).
I would love variable pricing... (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfortunately, it sounds like what the record companies want is to just raise prices on the popular songs and keep the 99c price on the older songs... I don't think that would be a smart move. There are enough people who think 99c is *barely* an acceptable price for a single song, once you go over the dollar barrier I think they might see sales drop enough to balance out the extra few cents. If they lowered prices on older songs (even only ones, say 5 years or older), though, they'd probably make it up through increased sales on that music.
It is not theft. (Score:2, Interesting)
No you haven't. All you have done is commit the crime of counterfeiting. You are attempting to conflate the definition of theft beyond all meaning where any activity possible can be called theft.
"In the same way, when a portion of folks take someting they are not entitled to"
Now you are off-topic. Duplication and taking are very different things.
You are caught up in a fallacy that "if it is illegal, it is theft"
Re:www.allofmp3.com (Score:1, Interesting)
At least one of us ACs realizes he got the point across. Most
I embrace the GPL for some of my work, having released one mainstream php package to the dogs, and contributing others. At the same time, I make my living from content and thus realize that someone has to pay me for some of this.
If I were living in mommys basement, I'd probably steal music too and comment on how unfair the world is while bitching that I can't get the cute girl at the Starbucks (that you absolutely hate going to because the yare a bunch of capitalistic pigs, but you are 'forced' to go there because 'the man' says so) to come over to my 'appartment' when my 'roommates' are gone.
Those fuckers don't even know what a troll is. They are afraid of someone saying something that is truthful and might disrupt their way of thinking. Poor fucking babies. It costs money to make albums and no one is forcing you to buy the shitty RIAA crap anyways.
This too will be moded down. I don't care...thats what AC is here for -- to fuck with the dweebs that still haven't gotten over getting picked on in high school, yet at the same time allowing them to feel as if they have some real power by allowing them to mod the unwanted down. Yeah -5 Troll doesn't work in real life and its not going to get the hot barista's boyfriend to go away either. This is fun!
Re:I don't believe it (Score:2, Interesting)
According to the deal we have with our (independent) label, iTunes pays out $0.67 per song download and then the distributor and label take their cuts and then we get the rest. With a major label, that "cut" is usually going to be a lot bigger than a indie label's cut.
Either way, the point is, Apple takes whatever's left over after they pay out the 65 or 67 cents or whatever it is. They don't split anything with the artist.
You raise a good point. (Score:2, Interesting)
You raise a good point. However, to continue with the analogy: is it stealing when you get into someone's data files with permission and copy them? As in nabbing those Pantera files from "kewlKazUser4005"'s hard drive on a p2p service after he has shared them for your benefit?
Re:Well they have to raise prices (Score:3, Interesting)
A couple weeks ago, I downloaded an album by California artist Mari Iijima. She's a former J-Pop star who's currently living in the US and putting stuff out on her own tiny label (mostly in English.) IMHO, the music she makes these days are leaps and bounds better than the stuff she used to record as a Japanese teen idol years ago... and almost nobody outside of the SF bay area seems to know about her.
Skim through other people's "iMix" lists and you can discover all kinds of gems like this.
Re:www.allofmp3.com (Score:5, Interesting)
Not in the long run. Paul Goldstein, a noted professor of copyright law from Stanford, pointed out something very interesting in a lecture I attended around 10 years ago. When music (or other copyrighted material, for that matter) is sold electronically (he was envisioning some kind of satellite on-demand streaming service, but the idea still applies), in a way that allows the sellers to keep track of the purchase history of individual buyers, then they could go to variable pricing that is variable per person, rather than just per song like you are imagining.
That is, they could figure out that you like that "fucked-up indie" stuff, and so charge you $4 for it, whereas if I think it is merely OK they might only ask $0.50 from me.
Note: Goldstein didn't say this would be a good thing. He was just pointing out the possibility that it might happen.
There was also some speculation as to how consumers could deal with this. I don't remember if Goldstein suggested this, or if it was something that me and my friends came up with while discussing the lecture later. Consumers could purposefully purchase stuff they don't like, in order to try to screw up the profile data, to keep the music companies from knowing what their favorites are. If buying a couple $0.50 songs from a genre you hate will keep them from raising one of your favorites from $2 to $4, it would be worth it. The music companies would probably tie in the purchase prices to the data from streaming services, so heavy music buyers could subscribe to streaming services, and have their computers listen to crappy music all day to skew the data.
Or maybe people could group together. Find someone who gets a low price on what you like, and for whom you have a low price on what he likes, and purchase for each other.
Re:Wal-Mart to the rescue! (Score:2, Interesting)
Considering that many of the older music artists are dead, who cares?
That is one thing that kills me about older recorded music. Take for example the Beatle's white album. Amazon is bragging about their deal for that album at $27.99 (20% or 6.99 of of MSRP I guess).
There are 30 tracks on this album that is now about 37 years old. I like the beatles and all, but considering 50% of them are dead and all, I don't see where the remaining two deserve even 1 cent for something they did 37 years ago. Hmm, maybe I should remind all of my former employers that if they use something I set up after I left, that I should get paid for it today. Oh, I signed a contract saying that I could not do that. Damn.
How do they justify it? (Score:4, Interesting)
I get my DVDs through Netflix, and pay about $1 per DVD (the whole thing, with any extras that may be on the disk). Netflix recently lowered their price (so now I pay about $0.90/DVD). Those are regular, effectively unprotected DVDs to watch anyway and on any device I choose (I sometimes rip them and watch them on my PDA).
Blockbuster and Walmart are competing for the same customers, and they charge even less.
CD music costs a lot of money to produce, but it doesn't cost 100th as much as a major movie (probably less than 1000th). Why are people paying so much for so little? Where is the perceived value?
I stopped buying major label CDs a few years ago, but increased my DVD rentals dramatically. There's no value in pirating DVDs at those prices. Studios are even moving the DVD release data closer to theatrical release (to reduce their costs).
While movie industry seems to be adapting, the music industry seems to be engineering their own demise. Not that anyone will miss them. Independent artists seem to be where the good music is these days, and they are much more reasonable in pricing their product.
Re:www.allofmp3.com (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Profit Margins (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a link in the
Re:New to the world? (Score:1, Interesting)
That sounds bad. Which civil liberties did he lose?
Re:www.allofmp3.com (Score:4, Interesting)
here in the UK we are charged $20-$25 for a new album, $30 or more if the album is older.
You yanks get everything cheap but still its too expensive for you...
Supply and Demand? (Score:3, Interesting)
However, in this case, there is almost unlimited capacity to scale the operation. Why not take advantage of this new market condition like Vanderbilt did when he revolutionized the steamship industry. [wikipedia.org] He sold tickets for a lower cost and padded his slim margins by adding value and revenue to the trips by selling food and drink. The record labels wouldn't even have to sell other services because they easily cover their operating margins.
The record companies are in the unique position to lower the cost of a song to say, $0.75 and take advantage of almost costless scaling. Why wouldn't they?
The simple answer I can think of is that the quality of the product that they offer is so poor that exposure to this music will lead to less return business. Take a tip from the late, great Sam Walton and discover the power of discounting. [wikipedia.org]
My Last DRM Experience (Score:2, Interesting)
Not knowing how many times she could copy it (she didn't know when I asked) I opened windows media player, created a playlist that filled the CD and clicked 'burn to CD'. The program began happily converting the tracks to the CD format until it reached the burn limit at which point I got an error message.
Here's the kicker:
I hadn't actually burned _anything_ - it just converted the format for the burn. When I adjusted the playlist, I couldn't burn anything. It had already marked all 10 burns that she paid for as done. DRM is _great_.
I ran a line out from the sound card out into the mic input and recorded an mp3 for her with a command line utility I have, then burned that to CD instead, but what a pain in the ass.
Now they want to charge her more money... omg.
Re:www.allofmp3.com (Score:3, Interesting)
You transferred it to the US and copied it there.
Whether or not that second copying is illegal depends on whether or not copying for personal use is permitted under your laws - some places it is some it isn't.
If it would be legal for you to buy a cd in russia, bring it back to the US and then copy it to your HDD, then allofmp3 should be legal too, since it is the same thing. Alternatively both actions could be illegal - depends on your local laws.
Re:www.allofmp3.com (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Moral questions (Score:3, Interesting)
So don't buy it. There is plenty of good music from independant labels, and many smaller bands give their stuff away for free on the internet. You have no right to, say, a Metalica song no matter how unfairly they price their songs. If you want it, you pay their price. That's the law. Your argument is flawed. There are other producers of music.
But if I copy music, although I get the benefit, the original owner doesn't lose anything.
Flawed logic. You're assuming that a consumer wouldn't go out and buy it if they didn't have any other avenue. Theft isn't the right word, but copyright-infringement *does* cost major labels money. Yes, you may be an idealogue and never buy an RIAA record. But since you are standing up for ideals, why are you listening to the music that the RIAA funds ??. Does the RIAA lose as much as they say. Probably not. Has music-sharing cost them money? Yes, and I challenge anybody to argue that assertion.
So copying music is only like theft of physical objects in some ways; in others, it's different.
Correct, but an analogy to drug cartels doesn't make it right to steal drugs. Jesus, I wish freakin people would get it through their heads. Though it's not stealing, it potentially costs labels sales. It's the potentially part that makes it different then theft, but it makes it none-the-less wrong. Don't anybody kid yourself. You have no right to distribute or recieve other people's music. Nada. Zilch.
That the RIAA is evil doesn't make any difference. If you don't like the RIAA, don't listen to any of the music they provide. If you do, you're a fucking hypocrite.
Do I wish the RIAA go to hell and die? Yep. There's no need for them when individuals record, produce and distribute their own music at minimal cost. Promotion and investment can be handled by radio stations. Though this has the scary effect of Clear Channel running the music industry even more than it is.
However, that does nothing to the fact that, by and large, illicit music sharing costs millions of dollars. Billions? Maybe, I don't know. But don't try and make yourself feel good by justifying it.
Re:Moral questions (Score:5, Interesting)
That's a great idea generally, but it's not a solution. Sugar is sugar; whether it's granulated or caster or whatever, and whoever supplied it, it has pretty much the same effect. You wouldn't complain because someone put the wrong sort of sugar in your tea, would you?
Music's different. People don't want some music, they want some specific music. Okay, much of the time their decisions are driven by marketing, familiarity, and comfort more than by quality, originality and skill, but either way music is not a commodity in that sense.
Erm, I never mentioned drugs! I just mentioned sugar. (Though I'd be prepared to argue that processed sugar has drug-like qualities for many people living in the Western world...)
And I'm not advocating stealing. I just think that we might want to reconsider what we define as 'stealing' in this context. Until then, the law is the the law and breaking it is by definition illegal. But laws are not immutable...