Naxos: Apple overcharging for iTunes albums

Apple can charge whatever they want, can't they? It's their service, and they are providing the bandwidth. I imagine they would lose money selling $6 albums.

because they have agreements with the companies that regulate pricing.

They sell plenty of albums under 10 dollars, mostly those with less than 10 songs.

Interesting... Apple refused to sell albums for more than $10 a pop, but what about selling them cheaper? Does the inflexibility work both ways, or is is just a cap?

If Apple were a retail chain, they could theoretically charge whatever they want, but stores often have pricing agreements with their suppliers--Apple's MSRP, for example--and I think the iTMS is in that category.

I'll also note that if it costs apple 35 cents per song for distribution, they could realistically set that as a bottom cap for the price of an album (tracksX0.35) to protect their investment, but if the price these guys want to set is higher than that, shouldn't that be ok?

Is this something that they need to be discussing in public? Not very professional if you ask me...

Well...if many of their customers are crying foul ..then it has become a very public issue for them. Therefore a public forum needed to address the masses.

Free advertising - that is all it is. Naxos wants a competitive advantage with pricing, and this is some free publicity.

If Naxos really wants to take the fight to the streets and into the public forum, why don't they also provide the details of the agreement to prove that Apple is actually overcharging, not just charging more than they would like.

Naxos CDs typically sell for $6-7 in retail stores. Who would want to buy a 128kpbs lossy version of the real deal, but pay $3-4 more for it? It only hurts iTMS to overcut the price of a smaller label CD, when the whole point is to undercut overpriced CDs by the big labels.

It's a flat agreement. 99 cents a song, no wiggle room, no deviations, no special negoations with any one label. Either agree to it or don't. It does work both ways, and usually no one is really estatic over the results, but hey -- it's working so far...