Apple Renews 99-Cent Song Deals

[soapbox]

Apple Computer has renewed deals with the four largest record companies to sell digital songs for 99 cents a track.

 

More here:

 

Apple Renews 99-Cent Song Deals

 

Best,

 

Geoff

[Phil O'Keefe]

Thanks Geoff! Personally, I think Bronfman's making a mistake and Jobs is correct on this one - you want to keep prices low to encourage purchasing over piracy and to grow the online market, and frankly, this distro method costs the labels LESS, not more - and IMO, when the labels push for variable rates and higher prices, and even ownership / shares of Apple, the public is more likely to see it as label greed instead of the label looking out for the artists.

 

At a buck a song, it's roughly the same price you pay for a physical CD in the store. The advantages to the consumer when purchasing online are ease of access, selection, reasonable cost and the ability to "just get what you want". For a lot of people, that compensates for not getting the "physical disk, artwork and packaging". None of which is material that had to be purchased / shipped by the label in order to make a sale, which means online purchases have advantages for them too insofar as decreased costs. But if you increase the purchase price for downloads, I think folks are going to see it as unfair in light of those facts.

 

I found it interesting that to read that many labels would find it difficult to implement databases to handle the sliding scale price thing... but at 99 cents a download for everything, it's a non-issue.

 

If I was giving advice to the major labels, it would be to grow the market and make the money off of volume instead of mark-up. Ultimately, I think it will be far better for business - and your market - in the long run.

[Anderton]

>

 

Absolutely 100% dead-on correct.

 

I also think this whole thing shows that the major labels have ZERO leverage on Steve Jobs. Interesting.

[Ara Ajizian]

Do yourselves a favor and visit allofmp3.com. Totally legal, multiple formats (including lossless) and bitrates, and they charge you by filesize rather than individual tracks. For --alt preset extreme mp3s you pay less than two bucks for the average album.

[Phil O'Keefe]

I also think this whole thing shows that the major labels have ZERO leverage on Steve Jobs. Interesting.

 

Well, when his service accounts for about 80% of all legal online music purchases / downloads, that carries its own significant clout. I'm sure the labels want "more", but OTOH, they don't want to lose the 5% of their overall revenue that iTunes brings in. And according to the article, it's really the only area where their market is actually GROWING. As I've said previously, if the labels mess too much with the current iTunes model and with Sat radio, they're shooting themselves in the foot by messing with the only two areas of the market where new technology, consumer interest and growing markets come together. IMO, that would be disasterous to their survival in the long run....

[object.session]

i think an important part of the way itunes work (from what i've heard, never used) is that it gets people to not think about the price they're paying. they know it's 99 cents per song and that's basically nothing. something like $1.29 could also be thought of as "basically nothing", but there's the risk that with varied or increasing prices, people might start thinking about the cost. and that would be a bad thing.

 

as i said, this is all from what i've heard. but i've heard multiple people mention how they have been using itunes for a while and just checked their records and couldn't believe how much they spent.