tech industry
02/28/2005, 10:55am, EST
Monday, February 28th
Top music labels try to raise prices for downloads
Apple CEO Steve Jobs was reportedly angered by recent pressure from record companies to raise the wholesale price of music downloads. Some leading music labels are in talks with online digital music retailers to raise wholesale prices for digital music downloads in an attempt to capitalize on strong demand for legal online music. The labels are apparently seeking a bigger slice of the profits from digital music sales, now that online services have become both common and successful.
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Go ahead, RIAA morons, jack up the price and watch sales drop precipitously as people go back to free and illegal download sources.
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.
my .02
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"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."
Personally I've already discovered several dozen new independent artists and will never give these scrubs a penny of my money ever again.
Actually the downloadable version of clues are now $.37.
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.
20% more of 0 additional sales is: $0
Then they'll come begging back.