iTunes is the big dog. with a bigger marketshare than WalMart and any other US music retailer, this is not the issue. the issue is keeping me coming back. i’ve not bought anything from the iTunes store for a while now, and with amazon selling higher bit-rate non-DRM music, there is an incentive for me to go elsewhere for my music purchases. and there’s the lure of the physical CD itself, at a higher bitrate than amazon again, and without DRM.
but my preference would be iTunes, even despite the lower quality. let me explain.
there’s iTunes regular and iTunes plus music for purchase. the regular version provides 128kbs with DRM and the plus provides 256kbs without DRM. clearly the latter is better as the prices are the same (although they weren’t originally) as we all like quality, and if we need the smaller files, we can always down-convert, whereas you can’t up-convert to the same effect. and the amount of Plus songs available has increased. several Queen albums are now available in the Plus variety and the price has dropped (Queen, the eponymous debut album can be got for NZ $11 in Plus variety, whereas it used to be $18 in the regular variety, for example)
i’m not so much out to bash the record companies here but to put down an idea. well, it’s two that are sort of dovetailed to a certain extent.
the first part is a loyalty program. the more songs you buy/money one spends, the next songs become cheaper. say the first 100 or so (pick a number, exactly what is a much more thorny issue) songs are sold at US 99c. then chop off a cent or two per song (all pain with by credit card so those of us in countries without 1c coins don’t suffer from the evils of rounding) for the next x songs. this will keep people coming back. however, the problem here is the record companies. their general policies have shown them to be rather retarded generally. apple apparently makes bugger-all, if not anything on the music part of the iTunes store, but it does keep the iPods flowing out the doors, which is where they make the real money. and cheaper songs for loyal customers would certainly not hinder that.
but then there’s the Steve, who seems to be entirely against split-level pricing. and the argument for this is a good one, everything is a x level, and thus there’s no doubt in the customer’s mind as to how much the bloody thing costs. but this fixed level pricing seems to be leaving. there’s SD movies at one level (i can’t remember whether it’s 1.99 or 2.99 or 3.99) and HD a dollar more. same for TV shows, the HD are a dollar more. song by song there is continuity in pricing, but by album there is certainly variation. i’ve seen albums for $9.99, and i can’t remember exactly what the highest price was, but for some collection it was in the hundreds of dollars. anyway, the point is that there’s also a good case against the policy of fixed-level pricing- it’s not being done. but at least we’re paying with dollars and cents, rather than credits like at a certain other store.
whether cutting the price for loyal customers would actually pay off would require a look at the books in terms of how many more iPods it would sell, how willing the record companies would be and a myriad of other factors that can’t be pondered, they must be known.
the case i wish to proffer is that of a sort of subscription service within iTunes. despite the attractiveness of going elsewhere, most people (in the US at least) go to iTunes for their (legal) music. if i could pay a monthly fee for the following, i would be happy:
access to listen to anything in the iTunes catalogue
and the ability to keep a certain number of these songs as my own, and a small fee for extras over the limit
this would allow me to sample a lot of music, but it would also allow me to own the stuff i want to and it would also serve as a sort of loyalty thing as the price for the extra songs could be less than the price if they were purchased separately. this would also keep the money rolling in, what’s more this could also cut down on the credit card transactions that have to be processed (and thus paid for) because instead of say, buying an album a week, and the credit card processing happening once a week, there would be one credit card thing a month, and then any extras. again, this is just theory. but it seems to be sound.
that would give iTunes even more clout. but as the record companies seem to be trying to set up something as a viable competitor to iTunes, methinks this ain’t gonna happen, as the record labels will be ceding more power to Apple, which they don’t seem to want to do.
we could have something that rates as better than the current iTunes store, but the wombles at the record labels are showing their brilliance by clinging desperately to the model that worked when people bought sheet music by the truckload.
