News for Saturday, 3 September 2005

Apple and some music Majors have engaged in a new battle over song pricing on iTMS. Sony BMG and Warner want Apple to drop its $0.99 unique price per song in favor of more variable prices. In short, new releases would be priced at $1.49 and oldies or crappies would go for less than $0.99.
This battle should be massive, but won't attract much media attention. iTMS, with its global domination and 75% market share can stand and resist the pressure coming from the Majors, stuck as they are between this de facto monopoly [yuk!] and the p2p networks (where songs cost nothing at all, except a dose of piracy).
But at the same time, companies like Sony Music have to try and break iTMS because its massively hurting their own legal music download services.
A view that nobody seems to care about is that of the artists themselves [the what? who are they?]. Let us remember that, after all, we are talking about distributing their creations and thus, about their revenue.