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Wednesday, September 26, 2007 12:00 AM

Amazon's MP3 store: Better than iTunes

For the first time, there's real competition to Apple's online music shop.

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  • Thursday, September 27, 2007 10:49 AM

    Apple gets 2X as much as the artists?!?!

    Maybe Apple is taking too high a margin on music? Somehow I doubt it. The label gets 70% of that .99 and the rest is for Apple and the artist. I believe the artist gets .10 leaving Apple with .20. That money has to take care of bandwidth, store design, dealing with Fairplay code (which is a requirement of the labels).

    Do you have any sources for that breakdown in price? If that breakdown is correct, should Apple really be getting twice the cut that the artists do? If they split 50/50 with the artits - bam you're at $0.89/track.

    Also, Rhapsody was able to charge $0.89/track for the last 5 years or so with the same need to provide DRM. They have a revenue stream from the subscriptions, but that has to support the development and upkeep of the technical resources for the subscription services.

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