Sep 21 2005
Steve Jobs Is My Hero
Mr Jobs said that by cutting out manufacturing jobs, selling through iTunes was already proving lucrative for record companies.
“So if they want to raise the prices it just means they’re getting a little greedy,” he said.
[...]
“We’re trying to compete with piracy, we’re trying to pull people away from piracy and say ‘you can buy these songs legally for a fair price’.
“But if the price goes up a lot, they’ll go back to piracy. Then everybody loses.”
Steve Jobs is my hero. There is, however, one thing he’s not fully understanding here. The record industry isn’t about satisfying customers, it’s about controlling the means of distribution to the very last possible variable. With iTunes, they don’t have that option, and the distribution model, while perfect for consumers, is scary as hell for them because they have zero control over it.
The other bad part for the record companies is that they can’t jack the prices up as they want. The iTunes music store is what it is because of its flat 99 cent pricing scheme. If you figure it, why would record companies want to charge more than that per song? It costs them nothing to produce a file, the files aren’t freely copyable, and they don’t have to supply the means to distribute it.
One word: greed.
Steve Jobs is my hero.
Source: BBC
September 21st, 2005 at 1:51 pm
Hero? Ha! Maybe after he drops the DRM we can have this discussion again.
September 21st, 2005 at 9:26 pm
The record companies have something else to lose - the revenue for all those awful album fillier tracks that we’ve been stuck with in the past.
You know the frill: go to the music store, pay $12 for a CD by an artist you know, or because of a singe you heard on the radio. Get it home and discover the rest of the album is garbage.
Anyone remember Falco, and his “Rock Me Amadeus”? On the strength of that single, my wife bought the cassette. Most of the other songs are in German, for pity’s sake.
Sometimes, it worked out. My wife and I both liked “One Night In Bangkok” when it was on the radio. I tried hunting it down, as they rarely gave the artists name. When I did find it, it seemed familier: Murray Head.. I tried to look up albums by Murray Head - no luck. (mind you, this was pre-web, and I was looking it up in books, and on the computer terminals in Borders and Record Town.) I finally discovered that it was from a Briadway soundtrack, for a show called “Chess”. I paid out over $25 for the 2-CD set. And I liked it.
Back to the point: with iTunes, you can buy just the tracks you want. Given the quality of a lot of recording artists, that means we’ll be buying 2, maybe three tracks of any given album. But the music company still paid for the rights to, and for the production of, all the tracks.
I think that’s more the reason why they are worried.
-cjb-