“One is a form of loan-sharking: they put up money to make records, then force recording artists to pay the money back with exorbitant interest. The other business is distribution. They’ve got big warehouses and they control the shipment of little plastic boxes that happen to have music in them.” [The Secret Diary Of Steve Jobs]
idolator
Which is better?
Itunes dominating the e-music market as a single vendor who can charge whatever they want (and I don’t think that Universal realizes that if variable pricing is what they want, it better mean that it gets cheaper rather than “premium” pricing) while simultaneously introducing gimmicks to get people to buy their overpriced stuff?
Or multiple vendors conspiring to keep prices artificially high while attempting to introduce gimmicks to get people to buy their overpriced stuff?
I see very little difference in the itunes dominated music world, and the way things have been. itunes is now adding stupid internet only presale codes to their pre-orders for albums (and hey, pre-orders what the fuck? WHY did this need to happen with music?). They’re throwing in itunes-only bonus tracks. The labels combat this (poorly) by putting crappy multimedia content on the discs like we’re still in the 90′s and there’s no youtube for this sort of stuff.
one’s just as bad as the other when the consumer is the one being shafted in the end.
Well, being as there are currently means of getting your music on iTunes at such a rate that you make over $6 per album sold (at least about 3x what you’d end up getting from a label deal currently considered extremely generous), I’m pretty sure whose side I’m on. (I’m not doing this to promote who I linked to, but numerous bands I know – including my own – really enjoy what they do.)
The genie’s out of the bottle. iTunes is undeniably the main digital download service, though if they start getting as exploitative of customers and musicians as the record companies are today, other services will crop up.