Filed under: iTunes
iTunes Store to add enhanced liner notes, extra media to album purchases
[The FT also reports, without hedging, that Apple's "media pad" tablet device will ship in time for the holiday shopping season. According to the paper, the long-rumored iPad is intended as a full-featured portable computer and video & music player, like an oversized iPod touch, including wireless data connectivity but no built-in phone functions.]
Apple has formed an alliance with EMI, Sony Music, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music to bundle whole albums with perks like interactive booklets, digital sleeve notes, and video clips. By doing so, Apple hopes to increase sales of the albums over single track purchases, a sales model that has been immensely popular in the advent of digital music.
The project, codenamed "Cocktail," is intended to recreate the former experience of album-purchasing, where you could browse the liner notes, follow lyrics, and look at the album artwork as the music played. Executives have said that users will even be able to play music straight from the proposed interactive booklets without having to use iTunes. Of course, the main motivation for increasing album sales is to increase profits, as albums have a higher margin than individual songs.
This change is one that should have taken place a long time ago- having to search for lyrics on shady, ad-ridden websites should already be a fading, shudder-inducing memory (though liner notes have been available on some albums, a change across the board has yet to take place). As items like liner notes and photos are possibly the last benefit that physical CDs can offer over digital purchases, this may turn out to be a very serious blow to the CD market. The iTunes Store album add-ons are set to roll out in September.
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
zsteiner said 12:41PM on 7-27-2009
Ahem, sound quality? Last time I checked, iTunes wasn't selling music in CD quality Apple Lossless. For people who care about audio fidelity, the iTunes store is still a no go.
Reply
Urbz said 4:40PM on 7-27-2009
My god...
Jon Iverson said 5:19PM on 7-27-2009
Yup I agree.
BulkHedd said 12:52PM on 7-27-2009
I wonder if these will be viewable on an iPhone/iPod? They have had the "digital booklets" for a while now but I don't believe you can transfer those to an iPhone, can you? At least not through iTunes.
Reply
spiceweasel said 1:02PM on 7-27-2009
i suppose this feature will then be included in future iphone os / itunes updates.
what i wonder more: after years of consumer ignorance courtesy of the music industry - do people actually still care about booklets? lyrics can be found online and even be embedded automatically into the mp3 files, and if i want something to look at, i go buy a CD or rather vinyl...
Jozue said 1:01PM on 7-27-2009
zsteiner: there is iTunes plus.
I wonder if these options will be availiable for all bands wanting to sell music on iTunes, or only the ones associated with the big four?
I'm in an indie band and we are going to be putting out some stuff on iTunes through CDBaby perhaps. I wonder if they will have that option. Would be really nice.
Reply
Doug Adams said 1:13PM on 7-27-2009
These things will open in QuickTime (thus the dubious "you don't need iTunes" feature). I believe The Store has a couple of interactive albums already, but I can't recall which they are.
Reply
Galley said 1:21PM on 7-27-2009
I love the concept of interactive booklets, and possibly an Apple tablet to act as a media controller (among other things), but I only buy CDs, not lossy digital downloads.
Reply
dev said 1:23PM on 7-27-2009
If I can get an album with 12 songs for 9.99, or buy them each individually for 11.88, I'd say the albums have a lower margin, not a higher one. Am I missing something?
Reply
Casey Johnston said 1:31PM on 7-27-2009
dev, I'm sure Apple would love to trick you into buying all tracks individually, but they can't pull the wool over most of our eyes :) I think their logic is more along the lines of wanting to give you incentive to buy albums in full, rather than just a couple of tracks from that album. Sales of most individual tracks on an album usually pale in comparison to one or two, especially if they are popular singles. If Apple can persuade you to get the whole album, they'll be making money on tracks that will otherwise hardly ever sell on their own.
ianlive said 1:31PM on 7-27-2009
Dev, your math is correct only if you assume that people who buy single tracks end up buying an album's worth of music, which apparently is not the case. It takes ten to twelve single track purchases to equal and album's worth of revenue. What Apple and the labels have found, as I have read, is that single track songs far outweigh full album sales and many of the single tracks sold are often the top hits only.
I agree with the Casey's point that this should have happened a long time ago and, although Spiceweasel said the info they're proposing is available in other places, getting all of the lyrics and photos into the right order under the "Get Info" section of the tracks is a real hassle. I think part of the reason that iTunes has done so well over P2P file sharing is that it is so neatly organized and every song title etc is accurate. I think this will be true for liner notes, photos etc.
dev said 1:58PM on 7-27-2009
I understand what you're saying. You're saying that the average user would create more revenue and profit downstream. This doesn't translate to margins. Margins are just a percentage. Therefore, because buying singles costs more, the amount apple's making per song actually increases.
profit/single-song > profit/album
assuming apple doesn't have a financial incentive from the labels to sell albums, of course.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profit_margin
Chester said 2:38PM on 7-27-2009
While I don't have any data to back this up, I would assume that not all songs carry the same profit margins. It is certainly conceivable that the higher rated, or more popular songs might have lower margins than the remaining tracks on the album. Therefore, entire album purchases could have higher margins overall than the percentages of individual song sales.
Meaning, if a person buys Song A, and the profit from this $.99 track is $.03 then they would have a little over a 3% profit margin. If the sale of a $9 album makes them $1.10 then they have a slightly higher margin on the album because of the album cost (or payout) to the record labels vs the individual track cost or payout.
Record labels would like this not only because of an increase in revenue, but also the hopes that people would like additional songs on the album, and be more inclined to purchase more music from the same or similar artists.
gib said 4:32PM on 7-27-2009
@dev You are completely mistaken, dude.
Imagine you like 4-5 songs from an album. You MIGHT buy the whole thing, you might just buy those 4-5. But, statistically speaking, most people are just buying the few singles, not the whole album.
By throwing in these little extras, the record labels and Apple are trying to convince these fence-sitters to download the entire album. While they COULD sell each track separately for a slightly high profit margin (per track), they will get more $$$ buy selling more tracks that normally would not have been purchased.
They could care less about profit margin, they want more profits.
Drifter71 said 4:45PM on 7-27-2009
I would think record labels would like to sell albums because they would make more money. They wouldn't have to put money into print media booklets, cd cases or even shipping to stores. I also agree that they would also try to make money by getting people to buy albums that wouldn't normally buy the whole album. To be honest, I really haven't heard too many albums lately that I could listen to the whole thing. What's great about iTunes is I can buy the one or 2 songs that are good and not pay for the rest of the crappy songs on the rest of the album. Of course the record companies want you to buy the crappy songs too.
I was hoping when iTunes started that bands would now have to put out better albums as you can preview all the tracks. With the exception of a few albums, this hasn't really happened.
bobbar said 1:33PM on 7-27-2009
Wow. And now if they could restore the Album Shuffle feature to the Touch and iPhone, they might convince us it's not in their best interest to sell single tracks, since that's how they expect us to listen to them.
Reply
ianlive said 1:32PM on 7-27-2009
Well, Casey beat me to that reply...
Reply
Carniphage said 1:55PM on 7-27-2009
The tablet story gets less credible with each twist.
No one wants a pocket device which too big for a pocket.
No one wants to run desktop apps on a 10" screen.
If Apple has a device like this, then they are targeting some unique selling point we do not know about yet.
C.
Reply
Frank said 5:16PM on 7-27-2009
1) no one ever said it was intended to be a pocket device, and
2) no one ever said it was intended to replace the desktop workspace.
Otsego_Undead said 4:18PM on 7-27-2009
This is something I've been asking for for a long time. At the very least, I just wanted the PDF booklets viewable without leaving iTunes and even better, viewable on my iPhone. This makes for a compelling reason to ditch the digital medium all together. If they want to make the booklets more interactive or whatever, even better-- again so long as you dont leave iTunes.
With well over 500 CDs the hardest thing to part with is the album art. And not being an audiophile, the quaility of digital music is just fine for me.
Now if only we can do something about the price. You would think with no production costs or materials that digital music would be DIRT EFFING CHEAP. Seriously, .99 is .99 pure profit.
Finally, let us re-download our purchased music. It would be so nice not having to worry about backing up our music. Apple/Amazon already have a log of every single purchase we've ever made.
Reply