Filed under: iTS
iTunes UK pwns competition for artist pay
Pretend you're a struggling musician. How much money would you rather take home for each track sold? £0.70 or £0.005? Not even a close contest, is it? Jacqui Cheng of Infinite Loop writes about a huge disparity between UK music services. iTunes just totally pwns the competition when it comes to artist and label payments. Cheng links to this Macworld story which suggests that iTunes is doing a far better job of getting money to artists than many other online music stores. If I were a struggling UK musician (as opposed to a person who can merely carry a tune in a bucket, or perhaps two buckets) I know where I'd spend my marketing dollars and which service I'd be promoting the hell out of.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Thomas said 4:30PM on 5-10-2007
I would personally withdraw from the other services at those levels of payment.
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Ogilvy said 4:30PM on 5-10-2007
Please what is pwns?
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Kevin Little said 4:32PM on 5-10-2007
I agree with Thomas why devalue your music on the other services selling it for next to nothing. Seems silly.
http://www.ebizmba.com
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The Jerk said 4:42PM on 5-10-2007
Not just the UK, either. As an artist on iTunes stores worldwide as well as other services, I receive more money from iTunes than any other. Not only does Apple provide the best hardware/software for my composing needs, they also give me the best cut for my music sold. This is why creative folks still love Apple.
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G said 5:19PM on 5-10-2007
@Ogilvy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pwn
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Ed said 5:51PM on 5-10-2007
Well, they'd be marketing pounds, not dollars...
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hmurchison said 6:11PM on 5-10-2007
No artist should expect to get rich on album sells alone. Songs are just a vehicle for ascertaining where you are hot and where to tour (where the real money is). However, all things considered, having more money per song doesn't hurt. :)
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JeffDM said 7:42PM on 5-10-2007
Sensationalism at its best, I'll call it shoddy reporting unless I see more information. A subscription service is different from purchasing. The comparison is so invalid that it's basically a beheaded quadriplegic. Anyone that assumes equivalence between the two types of services is flat fooling themselves.
The subscription services aren't selling tracks, it's track rental. So it is 0.70 for a purchase, or 0.005 for (probably) a month's rental. That said, it would take nearly 12 years of renting to make it equivalent to a sale on iTunes, assuming the numbers are correct.
Personally, I would love to see a subscription service that allows affordable music sampling, some iTunes competitors even allow three plays of a given track for free, any more and they ask you to subscribe or buy the track. I'd use it but it didn't work on my computer.
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Tod said 11:12PM on 5-10-2007
#3: Good question.
#5: How the heck would we non-gamers know this, or even that we should go looking in WP. To me it simply looked like the author couldn't spell "owns," possibly because she was hitting the wrong key (the O and P are next to each other), and I left it at that.
-Tod
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tundraboy said 12:49AM on 5-11-2007
It's not sensationalism. It's just another indication that music rentals is not a viable business model. The music rental outfits just cannot pay the record labels as much as Apple can because no matter how you slice and dice it music consumers exhibit a fundamental 'irrationality': They're willing to pay way more per song for the privilege of owning it out right even if they know they'll tire of it and stop listening to it later on.
On top of that, what would a music rental customer who is paying a fixed monthly fee do? Well, download as much music as he possibly can of course. So that monthly rental fee gets distributed across more songs, hence the lower per song payments to the labels.
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G said 2:58AM on 5-11-2007
@Tod
Even though I knew the answer from gaming myself, I Googled "pwned" and, as usual, Wikipedia had the most concise answer to present for Ogilvy's (and others') enlightenment. It took all of 3 seconds. Don't be distressed, and don't confuse me with the original author of either article.
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sam said 11:35PM on 5-19-2007
haha tod was "pwned"
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rex Anderson said 6:07PM on 5-11-2007
I just love esoteric gaming jargon. Is there a phrase for killing an underworld monster successfuly without staining one's tee-shirt with Mountain Dew & pizza sauce; or would that be considered a "pwn" as well?
Happy hunting y'all.
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G said 10:17PM on 5-11-2007
How sad that some people need to make themselves feel superior when presented with nothing more than a new vocabulary word. Why is that?
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