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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Why after all the whining from the record labels about Apple not wanting different (i.e. higher) prices are they allowing Amazon to sell for .89?
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).
Don't get me wrong. Competition is great. Enjoy the spoils for now but look at the bigger picture and see that once again the labels are trying to manipulate you. Here's a possible scenario:
The labels entice you with price giving a better deal to Amazon than Apple. They hope the store gets popular. Then they have leverage against Apple for the next round of negotiations. If Apple doesn't allow the price structure they want (higher price for newer music) then they won't sell to Apple anymore because now they have Amazon.
Apple's iTunes Music store sees its inventory dwindle and people stop thinking of it as THE place to get music online.
Amazon becomes popular as it has more songs and artists. The only place to get the newest singles will be Amazon and they'll surely sell the newer singles for more. Amazon obviously won't take a hardline on prices like Apple has (as it has a variable price structure now anyway) and it will be the ONLY place to get the new tunes.
The labels win, Apple is hurting but not too badly because it makes the real money on iPods and the customer loses. Once again having to pay more for certain things and less for others determined by who the record labels think will make them the most money.
Hopefully the customer won't even realize how they've been screwed again as they've gotten used to Amazon's pricing.
I find it amusing that iTunes partisans are reduced to arguing that Apple DRM is no big deal because you can crack it anyway.
Techies dislike DRM on the principle of the thing, not because it actually presents meaningful barriers. Indeed, the fact that DRM presents no meaningful barriers and is simply an inconvenience for the consumer is a big part of the argument against it. There's no reason an online music store should require you to violate the DMCA just to enjoy fair use of your purchased content, and a store that asks you to do so - no matter which particular entity on the supply chain is imposing that restriction - does not deserve patronage.
Farhad is essentially right in that right now Amazon is superior to iTunes in just about every quantifiable way, and that unlike iTunes, Amazon is entirely DRM-free. As a matter of principle, Amazon is better. As a practical consumer matter, Amazon is probably better. If you dig the iTunes interface, that's your prerogative, but myself I'd rather have a simple browser-based store than a proprietary closed-source standalone program that hogs resources and insists on being my media player. Besides, the nice thing about a browser-based store is that browsers are part of a whole modular, interoperable philosophy that allow you to choose your own programs for each task instead of vertically integrating everything into one behemoth. If you still want to use iTunes to play your Amazon tracks, you can.
Mind you, I find the speculation that Amazon's current offerings are subsidized price- and consumer-rights-wise by labels hoping to establish a viable iTunes competitor convincing. Of course, this seems merely like an additional reason to get while the getting's good (and give labels some market data about what sort of prices for digital music consumers find acceptable in the process). I won't complain about an opportunity to exploit their moment of desperation for all it's worth...
Oh, and transcoding your MP3s into audio CDs for backup purposes is just asinine and a waste of data storage (unless you're one of those stick-in-the-muds that still use CD-audio only players, of course). Backing up your data is a good thing, backing up your data in a format that takes up 10x the space and requires you to constantly swap discs is silly and framing the additional inconvenience as somehow a "perk" for iTunes is delusional. Copy your MP3 collection onto a few DVD-Rs or an external hard drive or something.
Your article about Apple's iTunes Store vs. Amazon's MP3 store is based on ignorance and misinformation. Here's what MacDailyNews had to say about this article:
"iTunes Store-purchased content works on Mac or Windows PC desktops and notebooks, can be burned onto music CDs and played on any CD player and—by ripping said CD—played on any MP3 player on Earth. It's quite simple. Known to just about anyone who's ever used iTunes. Yet, it's amazing how many people get this wrong either by lazily repeating ignorance or intentionally spreading disinformation, isn't it?"
One is tempted to expect better from Salon. It's amazing to me how many so-called journalists nowadays are perfectly willing to write articles about subjects they know almost nothing about!
Three words of advice: Check your facts!
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.
"When I pointed out that you're ruining your songs this way you say that the distortion is only minimal. Even if you're right, I still don't get why you like this idea -- you've still got to burn and then rip your music in order to break it out of FairPlay, which you don't have to do with unrestricted MP3s. Don't you see some added benefit in that?"
First of all, Farhad, you said songs bought through iTunes can only be played on Apple equipment. And that is wrong.
Second, you've changed the subject to MP3 isn't as good a format.
Third, you're now asking people why they don't appreciate that you can get this faulty format from the start.
Hmmm ... You want to slam Apple for letting users convert CD audio to MP3 but you want to praise Amazon for offering MP3 files.
You're annoying me ...
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