digital music/video
09/28/2005, 2:55pm, EDT
Wednesday, September 28th
Warner says cutting off iTunes maybe necessary
Warner's digital strategy chief says that labels might have no other choice than to cut off Apple's digital music sales, leaving the iTunes Music Store without many of its popular tracks. "What if Jobs says 39 cents or 29 cents per download - what then? The industry can say, OK we'll cut him off - very few people people buy music from digital downloads," said Nash, according to the report from The Register. Digital downloads form a fraction of the music market, and Apple only makes four cents from every 99 cent download, but the company has been using the iTunes Music Store to supplement its wildly popular iPod music player. Earlier this month, Jobs called the music labels "greedy" based on their desire to raise prices on some music and said the move would be detrimental to the industry by pushing consumers back piracy. [corrected]
Filed under: industry
Other story tags: digital music/video
, 
, 24
, 
, 
, 
, 
, 
Top
subscribe to comments
for this article
Copyright on music is always going to be like the speed law--most people look at it like a recommendation; you are not guilty until you are caught.
And if legal downloads are such a small part of of the industry then why are the labels so concerned with piracy? I though legal downloads made up a rather large part of all digital music downloads.
If so then saying that legal downloads are such a small part I dont see why they would be concerned with piracy then... bigots.
That's like saying we've been charging you 99 cents for this product for a while now and because for no other apparent reason except that they want more money we are going to make some crazy prcing scheme and try to milk our customers for more money. I wish I could get a pay raise the same way the record companies do.
However, all the iPods sold will only drive users to find alternative ways to fill those huge storage capacities.
I can definitely see a boost in the subscription-based services as tech-savvy folks say 'fine, screw it then. i'll subscribe to those services and find ways to make sure that i can KEEP the music i have downloaded'... idiots!
"We want total control over price, distribution, profit, artists, consumers, communication, and hey, innovation-of-an-kind? Could you please bend over so we can stick it to you too?"
I hope they're running Windoze so some PO'd elementary schooler with 100,000 pirated songs can someday write a virus that will F's their $3/song rent-an-artist model as badly as their F-ing with creative license and modern copyright precedent.
Not a scientific survey, of course, but from my experience I'd say, yeah, there's a lot of people who are going to P2P no matter what as long as it's available, but I think there are a significant number of folks who WANT to do the right thing, if it's made available in an simple and affordable way. iTMS mostly does that.