Top music labels try to raise prices for downloads

...that link told me nothing new.

When will they learn? People are paying now because it's a reasonable price.

Go ahead, RIAA morons, jack up the price and watch sales drop precipitously as people go back to free and illegal download sources.

This is supposed to suprise anyone?

First they kill napster because they were too STUPID, LAZY, and IGNORANT to see that they could make money with the new paradigm.

Now, they want to go back to the old system of RAPE THE CUSTOMER for substandard product.

HEY HOLLYWOOD, LISTEN UP. If anything, your prices should reflect the demand, which in the case of 90% of all music, prices would drop. I often use the analogy of downloading Tiny TIm's "TIptoe Through the Tulips". Who in their right mind would pay .99¢ for this today? No one. Now if it could be bought for 5¢, maybe thousands would download it. So, instead, we use Gnutella and just take it because your too STUPID to make it easy for us to pay for it.

The lesson is this, the recording companies aren't just the average companies trying to make money, they are stupid, arrogant, hostile to their customers, and out-of-touch with reality.

So what is the reality: The Music Industry today is a dinosaur: Extinct! Actually, in my opinion, they get what they deserve.

The recording industry is nothing more than a glorified niche promotional agency for talent. And we all know how powerful the internet is at creating something out of nothing. We dont need them anymore. Buh-bye!

The lesson to artists: Any promotional agency can do what the record companies do. Stay away from these record company vampires and make money for yourself.

Apple has seemingly negotiated the 'sweet spot' for pricing and the RIAA is going to screw up everything because of greed. The only answer is for Artists to blow off the labels and go directly to the customer, through iTunes for instance.

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"Let's see, there's been 100 million downloads at Apple.com. People want download music. So let's raise the price 20 cents. Because if we did that to start with, we'd have 20 million more dollars now."

"Doh! We're so stupid."

"Hey, you know, if we doubled our rate, we'd make twice as much money! What the hell were we thinking. Let's double the price. We'll be raking in money, because people obviously will pay whatever price we ask!"

The problem with these guys is they've never dealt with real economics. They've only lived in their world of rights fees and price fixing. If they actually hired someone who knew something about business, who could actually tell them "hey, you know, there are these curves called price and demand, where, for each price, there's a specified demand, and, hey, look here, sometimes if you lower prices, it raises demand more, and you actually make MORE money by selling MORE product. Sort of like how Dell makes money. Huh, oh Dell. They're a computer company. No, computers. Their the things people use to download music from the internet. The internet. You know, the thing you're trying to keep your music off of. Yes, its kind of like "the web". Um, guys, hate to tell you, but I'm quitting. No, McDonald's offered me a better job. $6.50 an hour and I don't have to clean the bathrooms."

Way to go music labels. Way to show by example that you still have no clue. All they will do is kill online music sales, push people back into pirating music again and then they'll go and complain that music piracy is up again! Duh! Haven't they figured out that people aren't gonna buy $18 CDs? Why should it be any different online? $10/album is the price point people are willing to pay.

Personally I've already discovered several dozen new independent artists and will never give these scrubs a penny of my money ever again.

"Here's $0.25, buy a clue"

Actually the downloadable version of clues are now $.37.

They (labels) should be kissing the ground SJ and Apple walk on for giving them a second wind.

In fact all download services owe Apple for this surge in legs downloads.

As for the labels, be grateful, because it should give you an idea of how much you would have never gotten had it not been for the iTunes music store.



greedy, greedy *ss pigs.

Apple should drop the labels that want to increase the price. Sure it would narrow their catalogue, but my guess is that labels will realize that:

20% more of 0 additional sales is: $0

Then they'll come begging back.