Lets all go deaf
In keeping pulse on Apple, you will no doubt, continue to hear about the recent dispute brewing between Apple and music companies seeking to kill the 99¢ price on iTunes for all songs. It’s easy to follow on the NYTimes, Wall Street Journal, MacWorld, PlaylistMag, and I’m sure a slew of other publications.
The general tone is that the music industry could band together to remove their libraries from Apple and iTunes store availability and choose other distribution methods. The critical blow everyone seems to be worrying about is whether a major, or couple of major, or maybe even all big record labels do it at the same time, Apple will take a kick to the pants and be forced to listen. The obvious problem to this is that this is a form of collusion and that, without question, the music industry is already fighting a PR battle and pissing people off en masse is always great for business.
How has industry been working?
They have simply curtailed the supply of easy to find, high-bit, downloadable music by flooding the internet with blank tracks which show up in the results for popular music. The song “Don’t Cha” by The Pussycat Dolls comes to mind. If you search for the song on just about any file-sharing app, you’ll come up with hundreds of results and most will download but hardly any will work or be an actual song. On the opposite end, they want to charge you $1.49 or more for the group’s one song and milk you while they can simply because, at least according to the CEO of the Warner Group, they are not sharing in the profits from the iPod. Hmmmm… really? Lets see, you expect a company (Apple) to simply giveaway some of their profits on a device they invented long before their popular music internet store had ever materialized with your merchandise (the music of record companies).
I reckon (sorry, I just had to use that word), that such an action really would precipitate your untimely death. Because in the same tone that record companies could rebel from the Apple Store/iPod handshake, couldn’t musicians forego the companies and go directly to Apple or to smaller more indpendent labels that would put them on an iPod for 99¢ ?? I reckon so.
Signal vs. Noise has an interesting post on this, as does, Playlistmag.com. UPDATE:You can also read the Washington Post article on the mattter.
