Starting yesterday, Apple started charging different prices for different songs in their iTunes Music Store. Popular songs are $1.29, less popular songs are $0.99 and the “bad” songs are $0.69. In addition to this, Apple has removed the DRM from all of their music. Even though removing DRM is a win for the consumer, the variable pricing is a terrible move by the music industry.
Apple has wanted to offer DRM free music for a long time but the music industry has never wanted to give in. DRM is another issue for another time, but I will say it is one of the worst and most useless technologies ever created. The music industry did cave though and in return, Apple (and now Amazon and Wal-Mart) has introduced variable pricing. Here are my top 3 reasons variable pricing sucks (in no particular order):
- There are very, very few $0.69 songs. The argument that Apple made when they announced the variable pricing was that to balance the more expensive $1.29 songs, they would have more $0.69 songs. Well, it’s a huge chore trying to find any of those songs and when you do, you probably don’t want them anyway.
- The music industry had a great opportunity to repair its tainted image with consumers. They failed miserably as this is just basically a price hike during a recession. Real nice guys!
- Variable pricing is just a stepping stone to a different type of music industry. In the future, music is going to be free and the record labels will tap into different revenue streams. Here is a great article about this by Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.
I am glad to see that DRM is finally being removed from music downloads as it causes more headaches than it does good. Hopefully the music industry will keep adjusting to the needs and wants of the consumer and just not what lines their pockets the most. As musicians learn that they don’t need a record contract to become successful it will only get better for the consumer. Thoughts?
I don't see why #3 is necessarily a reason why variable pricing sucks? The biggest music store in the world removing it's DRM definitely is a stepping stone to what you correctly identified as the future of digital music, but that's a good thing? Apple isn't going to embrace a Songza or Pandora or Last.fm model in 1 swoop, but in stages.
ReplyDeleteAs for the pricing divide, in a sense this should be good for music. I've always been a big fan of variable pricing as a means for discovering new music (the Amie Street model) it drives traffic to unknown bands and encourages established artists to compete on quality rather than just publicity and presence. I think that this issue with Apple's pricing model is the static & bucketized system. Good, unknown bands have to wait to produce music that gets awarded a higher price, and established artists aren't "punished" for producing crap. Further, in this model, pricing isn't a discovery tool, rather just a backwards looking predictive tool. But it's still an improvement over the odd one-price-fits-all model they were working with.
Anyway, I agree with you that Apple's move isn't perfect, but I disagree that this is a bad thing, or a step in the wrong direction.
I think my biggest problem is the fact that it's basically a price hike on their most popular songs and they really didn't do a good job balancing it with the $0.69 songs.
ReplyDeleteI did mention that I am glad that they removed DRM which is good to see.
Heck, I really don't buy that much music anyway so it doesn't bother me. :)