Posted on Thursday 6 October 2005 - Popularity: unranked
MacDailyNews has an interesting independent label owners view of the ongoing debate between Apple and the major labels on the iTunes 99c pricing up on their site.
Increasing prices now, obviously isn’t going to increase number of downloads and, in fact, might stall the whole market and this is my main concern. At US 99c, (actually more in UK, Europe and Japan) it seems that many fans are reasonably happy with the price, so why ‘rock the boat’ now and just alienate them. We need to remove the incentive to steal/copy/buy bootlegs and create a “culture” of paying for music, which has unfortunately eroded in the last few years. There is actually a significant proportion of fans that are paying, not because they can’t get it for free, but because they want to do the “right thing”. Some, simply can’t be bothered to search for free music, when they can easily find it and buy online. Of course, if you raise the price, this “proportion” will decrease - everyone has a price.
They make some very good points. Let’s just hope the big labels are listening.
