Is 99 cents per song a fair price for music?
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From the previous thread and countless other conversations, one of the things I keep hearing over and over again is that record companies charge too much for CDs. If they were more reasonably priced, so the reasoning goes, there wouldn't be such massive piracy. They're being greedy and unfair, and consequently it's justice of some sort to take their music for free. I'm also often reminded that the old music business model is now dead, and people point to the success of iTunes and the 99 cent song / $10 album to highlight the fact that this is a better way of doing business and one that the public finds acceptable. For the sake of comparing apples to apples (apologies for the pun), let's limit our question to the titles available on iTunes, which of course are also heavily pirated nonetheless. With that in mind, is 99 cents per song a fair price for music? If so, as iTunes' success would seem to demonstrate, why is piracy still rampant if acceptable pricing is the issue?
Christopher Duncan Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes www.PracticalUSA.com
Yes, but so what?
Christopher Duncan wrote:
acceptable pricing is the issue?
Obviously it isn't. On the other hand, due to lack of portability, I would pay less for an iTune than for an MP3. No one should ever buy an iPod; buy a generic MP3 player instead.
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From the previous thread and countless other conversations, one of the things I keep hearing over and over again is that record companies charge too much for CDs. If they were more reasonably priced, so the reasoning goes, there wouldn't be such massive piracy. They're being greedy and unfair, and consequently it's justice of some sort to take their music for free. I'm also often reminded that the old music business model is now dead, and people point to the success of iTunes and the 99 cent song / $10 album to highlight the fact that this is a better way of doing business and one that the public finds acceptable. For the sake of comparing apples to apples (apologies for the pun), let's limit our question to the titles available on iTunes, which of course are also heavily pirated nonetheless. With that in mind, is 99 cents per song a fair price for music? If so, as iTunes' success would seem to demonstrate, why is piracy still rampant if acceptable pricing is the issue?
Christopher Duncan Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes www.PracticalUSA.com
Christopher Duncan wrote:
is 99 cents per song a fair price for music?
No, I listen to music for free on the wireless.
Christopher Duncan wrote:
why is piracy still rampant if acceptable pricing is the issue?
Probably because you can get it for free on the wireless :)
print "http://www.codeproject.com".toURL().text Ain't that Groovy?
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MidwestLimey wrote:
It wouldn't truely be merit over marketing, as teenagers are a bunch of moronic sheep
Please say that was a joke.
Why do you think it is a joke? :confused: 75-85% of adults (with many more years of experience than teenagers, I might add) are moronic and/or sheep. This is after they have gotten over the massive hormone surges of adolescence, and more or less figured out how to deal with the world. People like to: 1) follow with out thinking X| 2) stop and complain about where they are lead :( 3) follow while complaining :doh: Hence, moronic sheep. :sheeple: (is there an emoticon for that?) I was a teenager. My children are teenagers. I have had many friends who were teenagers, either while they were my friends, or before I knew them, and we all have (with the exception of my children) made the same statement, at one time or another, and with good reason. This goes beyond anecdotal evidence. ;P Richard
Silver member by constant and unflinching longevity.
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Vautour wrote:
which then gets tranfered to collecting societies (I hope that's the correct word).
I think instead of societies you wanted agencies. It's hard to be sure though since you didn't exactly say what they do with it or how that works. I assume they use that pool to reimburse the copyright holders, etc. Not trying to offend, just offering some translation help (hopefully).
Nope, I'm not offended. English isn't my native language so it's quite normal not knowing the correct expression for such things and now I've learnde a new word. Thank you or that :) Yes, that's what I meant. There are different collecting agencies depending on what kind of medium you use. "VG Wort" (free translation: "collecting agency word") is the agency which gets the copier fees, as far as I know.
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From the previous thread and countless other conversations, one of the things I keep hearing over and over again is that record companies charge too much for CDs. If they were more reasonably priced, so the reasoning goes, there wouldn't be such massive piracy. They're being greedy and unfair, and consequently it's justice of some sort to take their music for free. I'm also often reminded that the old music business model is now dead, and people point to the success of iTunes and the 99 cent song / $10 album to highlight the fact that this is a better way of doing business and one that the public finds acceptable. For the sake of comparing apples to apples (apologies for the pun), let's limit our question to the titles available on iTunes, which of course are also heavily pirated nonetheless. With that in mind, is 99 cents per song a fair price for music? If so, as iTunes' success would seem to demonstrate, why is piracy still rampant if acceptable pricing is the issue?
Christopher Duncan Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes www.PracticalUSA.com
Well, I think it's better than the alternative. Paying 99 cents for a single song you like is much better than paying $10-15 for the same song when you have to buy a CD full of stuff you don't like to get that same song. Would it be nice if it was cheaper? Of course. But there are a lot of costs in producing recorded music. People talk a lot about how they think the distribution costs of things over the Internet is zero. That's simply not true. Servers and bandwidth are expensive, especially since you have to maintain enough of both to handle maximum loads in a worst-case scenario (i.e., the release of a popular song). Writing or buying software to run the servers is expensive. True, virtual distribution scales much better than distribution of physical media, but it still adds up and costs quite a bit of money, which has to be passed along to the customer. Another hidden expense that almost everyone misses is credit card charges. Credit cards typically charge a percentage of each transaction, but they also usually have a minimum transaction fee. When I was writing software that dealt with credit card billing a few years ago, we had a minimum per-transaction fee of around 35 cents. I'm sure that's flexible depending on your transaction volume, but given that the people who price songs have to assume the worst case (everyone is going to be purchasing songs one at a time), that's a huge chunk of that 99 cents. All of this is to say that companies that charge 99 cents may not be making much per song. They're hoping to make it up in volume. Ed
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Nope, I'm not offended. English isn't my native language so it's quite normal not knowing the correct expression for such things and now I've learnde a new word. Thank you or that :) Yes, that's what I meant. There are different collecting agencies depending on what kind of medium you use. "VG Wort" (free translation: "collecting agency word") is the agency which gets the copier fees, as far as I know.
Glad you took the lesson as I intended instead of the offense I didn't. :-D That is an interesting system I guess. Thanks for sharing. Of course, now they'll raise prices for everything so those who pay for things get charged extra to pay for the people who don't. Kind of like the more honest you are, the more you suffer. LOL