Jobs to Labels- Lose the DRM & We'll Talk Price

eldavojohn writes "Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been talking smack about DRM and has recently issued a verbal offer to major music lables stating that if they are willing to lose the DRM, he'd be willing to raise his 99 cent price for those iTunes songs. These tracks (such as the recent EMI deal) would also have better sound quality & cost about 30 cents more."

Re:Defeats the point

[Echnin]

...Except albums are still $9.99 without DRM and at the higher bitrate.

Re:Album deal

[remahl]

They have always had a deal on buying an entire album. And it's even more advantageous now that the per-track price has increased.

Re:Raise it from 99 cents?

[lurker5]

But you are also paying a monthly fee which you must factor in. If you're like me, who buys at the most 10 tracks a month, $1.30 is not that bad. No matter what the others say, $1.30 for a high quality DRM-free download with no montly fee is still a great deal.

Re:So... *More* than buying a CD?

[geek]

If you buy the whole album, even if it has 20 tracks, it's $9.99. Please do a little research before spreading this FUD.

I'll stick with my emusic account

[rsilvergun]

No DRM, good quality mp3s, and 75 downloads a month. Yeah, I can't find too many big names, but there's plenty of stuff there just as good.

Re:Here are some figures

[shawnce]

The "30%" only applies to song purchase. Album purchases haven't changed in price when buying 256kbps sans DRM.

Re:Are consumers that dumb?

[Lumpy]

There is NO drm on the music on the Audio CD that can legally be called a Audio CD.

there are half-assed attempts to make a PC not read them, which are in fact NOT DRM.

So the OP is actually right, you are the one that is mistaken.

And I agree with him, I'll pay less for far higher quality on CD without paying anything to the RIAA.

I buy all Cd's used :-) and it upsets the RIAA more than the pirates.

Re:Are consumers that dumb?

[maxume]

Cd Audio is sampled at 44100 Hz, at 16 bits per sample. While sampling at a higher rate and bit depth than that will improve on the quality, the average pair of 25 year old ears will not be able to hear the difference. Wikipedia says that a piano tops out at about 4100 HZ:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_key_frequencies [wikipedia.org]

Lower frequency music is going to have harmonics or whatever that go above that, but it means that even crappy old CD audio is sampling typical musical tones quite a lot more than 10 times per oscillation. The people who designed the standard, what, 30 years ago, did a very good job.

Re:Are consumers that dumb?

[n8k99]

(I know they are really a group of companies controlling everything, but you understand what I'm saying)

that's called an oligopoly.

Re:So... *More* than buying a CD?

[SnowDog74]

You say: An album worth of tracks on iTunes cost more than a full price new release.
I say: Buy the album at the album price, not the tracks individually. Whether there are one track or twenty five on it, it will cost you less than the CD.

You say: iTunes will not let you mix and match an album worth of tracks for the price of an album.
I say: No one else will. Not Amazon. Not Best Buy. Nobody.

Oh, and by the way... if you already bought a couple tracks of an album and want to complete the album, iTunes will let you grab the rest of the album for the album price less the money you already paid toward the tracks you already have... even THOUGH as a portion of a full album the per track price is less than 99 cents, they're still letting you apply what you have paid thus far to an album price, rather than a prorated per-track album completion price. The same model will likely apply when the per track price is $1.30 and the album prices are still $9.99 even for the higher fidelity (as Apple has stated they plan to do).

Care to identify a single music retailer other than Apple who will do this?

The problem in your assumptions is that you think that the entire price of a product is associated only with the tangible materials that went into it. As if there are no other people to be paid other than those who work at the manufacturing plant, and as if there's no inherent market value to the INTANGIBLE content... (i.e. lyrics, music) in a musical work, and as if there are no costs to maintaining data centers with global load balancing that can serve millions of customers worldwide without crashing to a grinding halt.

Also, you're saying it starts to look worse and worse for individual singles. Do you remember when a single cost $1.49 to $3.49 just to buy it on a crappy analog cassette? I sure as hell do... and then you could only buy the singles that the studio released AS singles. You had no option of buying almost any track off an album, much less digital. It has only gotten better.

There is also a premium associated with the convenience of the iTunes model. Amazon will charge you shipping unless you want to wait an indefinite period for their SuperSaver shipping by which time you could have downloaded many times that amount of content from iTunes. Your time is worth money... how much? That's open to debate depending on the individual but I would imagine it's no fun to wait days on end just to get that one song you wanted... and when you do, Amazon won't let you have just that one song. It's got to be the entire album... one song you want, and a bunch you might not.

There is no direct analogy between what Amazon offers in terms of product and service, versus what Apple offers. And you are overlooking a very important competitive edge here because the ability to mix and match whatever tracks you want at a fair market price is one of the key attributes that makes iTunes so much more convenient and consequently hugely popular and still increasing in popularity.

The Apple business model can command a premium for the non-DRM tracks because of the limited alternatives to having their a-la carte purchasing options and the convenience of their user interface, search capabilities and purchasing system.

Re:Why hasn't anybody written a workaround for DRM

[macshome]

DRM Dumpster has been doing this a while now...

http://www.burningthumb.com/drmdumpster.html [burningthumb.com]

Re:Are consumers that dumb?

[my $anity 0]

Apple is also acting as a middleman. They give the consumers something they want (no DRM, higher quality) in exchange for a higher price. They give the sellers something they want (higher price) in exchange for something they are reluctant to give (no DRM, higher quality) In the end, this give the Slashdot Hive Mind what it wants (less DRM in the world). In the end, Apple sells more tracks as audiophiles and people who care about rights snap them up. Everyone is happier, which is the way economics should be.

Re:Are consumers that dumb?

[Rei]

You can still improve, though, without using any more space. Sample at a faster rate and using more bits, then use standard audio compression methods to drop the least audible frequency components. Same file size, better quality. Basically, you're choosing that you want *all* frequencies up to 22,500 hz, *nothing* more than that, and all frequencies stored with equal bit resolution. By going with audio compression, you can avoid being so artificially limited; your algorithm can pick out the most important components to store.

The 44,100 hz/16 bit sampling rate isn't bad. It's just not optimal.

Re:Where are the EMI songs?

[TheRaven64]

According to every press release and article about them, they will be appearing 'in May.' The end of May has not been reached yet, so you may have to wait for up to three more weeks.

Re:Marketing

[bkr1_2k]

It's not difficult to get music or videos off the ipod. Apple just doesn't provide you the tools to do it.

Re:Soundbite society

[Just Some Guy]

OF COURSE some CDs have DRM.

OF COURSE no Compact Disc Digital Audio disks have DRM [wikipedia.org]. There are a few non-audio discs that contain some audio information that may be so infected, but it's impossible for a CDDA disc to be ruined that way.

Re:Are consumers that dumb?

[drinkypoo]

Most of my music, you can't tell at all. But with some of it, for example some Praga Khan, there is noticeable distortion at the very highest quality settings available, and with VBR, 320kbps fixed, Stereo, Joint Stereo, you name it. mp3 just doesn't manage to give acceptable results with some type of audio (the example in question is a fuzzed square wave on one of the "Breakfast In Vegas" singles.)

Re:Are consumers that dumb?

[bograt]

I've read double-blind studies all the way back to c't in 2000, which said that twelve audiophiles and one sound master at a record company couldn't tell CDs and 256kbps MP3s apart.

Fine, but that has nothing to do with the grandparent's point. The point was that audiophiles will hear a difference between 16-bit 44.1 kHz audio and 24-bit 96+ kHz audio. Nothing to do with MP3 at any bitrate.

(I have no opinion either way, my ears are shot to pieces, I'm just trying to make a stand for logic.)

Re:Are consumers that dumb?

[danpsmith]

Apparently you don't understand the distinction between a single device doing a single thing well (appliance) and a general purpose computing device's OS that has certain anti competitive and lock in/lock out mechanisms and the implied threat that if you create anything actually useful, that the manufacturer of the OS might come in and either compete directly or even give away a competing applications.

Oh I get it, it's just I thought analogies were supposed to make a complicated example *less* confusing.

Re:Audio Quality

[frogstar_robot]

Lossless codecs cut that 650/700 MB down to 350MB or less. Also many albums don't use the full capacity of disc. If one buys tracks ala carte then the numbers look even more reasonable.