Record companies happy with new iTunes pricing (duh)

Honestly, they think INCREASING the price of music will stop piracy? I mean, I'd never buy an album on iTunes. 10 bucks for 128kbps isn't worth it at all. For the same price, I could pick up a physical CD and rip lossless. Now, we're gonna be paying 12.99 for a lower quality file? No thanks, I'll stick with my CDs.

I used to like the iTunes music store. However the inability to buy every song ala carte. The "album only" thing bugs me.

This turns me off even more.

In the digital age one song is essentially worth the same as another. I don't see the point of variable pricing from a consumer stand point. Then again, the record companies have been anti-consumer for decades.

You can kiss bargain hunting by going to other music stores goodbye. They were only cheaper and DRM-free to try to get people to use them instead of buying from the iTMS (to get leverage on Apple, so Apple would budge on $0.99/song). Now that they have their 30% price increase, you can bet the other music stores (which already caved on variable pricing up front) will suddenly find prices will be remarkably similar to Apple's new prices.

The $1.29 will not be just for the hot new single. It will be for the songs that were 'the hot new single' at any time in the past. Anything you want to buy will be $1.29, and anything that you preview that makes you go 'huh?' will be $0.69.

Hopefully the indie labels will still keep the music at .99 cents or less. I try to avoid buying music from major labels as best I can because they're a bunch of punk bitches w/ a very, very rare good cd. The indie labels are what produce good artists. So here's hoping they don't sell out.

As an owner of an independent record label who deals with iTunes, Amazon and others, including subscription services like Rhapsody regularly I felt compelled to comment on this mild controversy. Of all the companies Apple, Inc. has been by far the most inflexible, most lagging in terms of response and the most monolithic corporate entity with its completely inflexible pricing system that makes sale parity between online stores (Amazon and iTunes mostly) an impossibility.

Furthermore, because our label sells AAC tracks directly from our website we find that our prices must continually undercut our lowest (what I would call "big box") online store price. Although iTunes tends to have the most expensive tracks already, what this new pricing means is that we can, as an independent label, at least have the flexibility to price releases lower if we would like which is currently an option with Amazon, Rhapsody, Amie St etc.

Tiered pricing schemes are necessary, not just for those who sell at high volume, but those of us trying to "incentivize" the purchase of more obscure music who sell releases in the dozens or hundreds. A song is a song, on the other hand, buying Police Academy on DVD shouldn't cost $25.99. Like a new release, it should be priced to, again, "incentivize" its purchase and be subsidized by more successful, less oblique releases.

Lastly, while I agree that music should be as cheap as possible, people tend to forget, conveniently so, that artists do invest a lot of time, money and effort into creating their work and deserve to be compensated. In our commodity obsessed culture it is the only way to increase and encourage artistic expression. As a small record label owner I think that this philosophy applies more directly to our business model. Celine Dion, Madonna, Radiohead and the like will make millions no matter what they do and large corporate beasts tend to like to reap as much as possible from that. What I hope is that musicians could unionize the same way a great deal of other creative and technical disciplines have and coalesce into their own self run record labels, like ours, and run the business with musicians defining the business of their music.

Until then, someone needs to develop, manufacture and distribute digital content, the machines to play it on and the advertising muscle to create large scale awareness that truly good music should be offered. Be patient, as Radiohead's "In Rainbows" has demonstrated, expensive large scale superstars don't need large labels anymore than the artists on our small label needs them. Large corporate music labels are a dying breed and they know it.

Nick - you can re-download Amazon purchases. Keep up with the times.

The big thing the record cos. will get is tons of data about sales and prices. They'll quickly figure out what people will pay, or not. I'm guessing they'll find out fast that $1.29 isn't going to be a price they can sustain once a song falls out of the top 10. And they may push new songs at 69c to get the sales going.

Keeping a simple business & pricing model is what made iTunes Store desirable to begin with. That is, people will 'buy' & 'pay' for online music instead of pirating it- but only if it's (a) reasonably cheap and (b) easy to access.

A multi-tiered pricing level just makes it more complex. And, to the consumer a song is a song. Why does one song cost .99 cents and another one $1.29?

Personally, if the per song prices creep up, I will see myself spending less money and time on the iTunes store. The beauty of iTunes Store was that you could preview an entire CD and just buy the songs that 'you' like at a reasonable price.

If equalizing online pricing to physical CD pricing is what music companies are pushing for, then they will be shooting themselves in the foot eventually.

Hey guys I interned at a record label in Nashville last year... I won't name which one but it was Top Five. Anyhow the music industry is struggling right now and what a lot of people don't understand is that the artists don't make shit off of cd or music sales... in fact they make pennies. I too don't understand why the price range is going up... The problem with the industry is that they are trying to make a quick buck instead of doing things right. They sign on crap artists who are one hit wonders with only three good tracks on their album. Remember back in the day when artists and labels actually cared what their music sounded like. Now they are just pumping out more albums and EPs so we can spend our money. I for one will not have it and will continue to rapidshare and torrent files. Don't get me wrong I will support the musicians who I like and who deserve it but you can kick me in my balls before I spend 12.99 on a Britney Spears cd.

> There's no question about it -- this latest change is one in favor of the record companies...

That's true if you look at it as a change that only has one side to it. The post ignores the other change that went hand-in-hand with flexible pricing, which was dropping DRM almost across the board. Neither change can be analyzed properly in isolation from the other side of it, unless of course the post is engineered just to rile people up and fluff up the comments.