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iTunes Pricing

I’m getting increasingly annoyed with the high pricing of albums on iTMS. Albums at $9.99 is pretty good… good enough that I’ll buy them quickly. But the latest N.E.R.D. album was released above $9.99 (it’s now $13.99) so I decided to not buy it at all (the CD still costs lots more). Now, the new Beastie Boys album is $14.85! I’m torn!

If I buy the CD, the labels just make more money off the purchase and it slows down the adoption of the digital distribution model (which I’m a big fan of), but if I pay the $14.85 on iTunes it encourages the labels and Apple to start pricing more digital albums higher than $9.99 (which is basically as high as they can reasonably go in my opinion).

So, I guess I might have to just steal it instead. Hrmph. They’re not making this easy on me. When are the labels going to get a clue?

UPDATE: I’ve now learned that the Beastie Boys CD has stupid ass copy protection on it, so I definitely don’t want to buy it. Celine Dion doing this I could live with, but the Beastie Boys? Man.

UPDATE2: The Beastie Boys album “http://www.beastieboys.com/news.php”>does not actually have copy-protection in the US or UK versions. The European version does because EMI releases everything in Europe with this particular copy-protection…. not just this one.

4 replies on “iTunes Pricing”

Here’s the thing, though. Labels actually make more off of a $9.99 download than on a $17.99 disc. To get that disc to you takes an awful lot of labor and middlemen. Here’s an article about how the industry seems to be trying to sink the digital model by raising download costs.

I bought several records off MusicMatch when it first started, but I still like having that disc, for now. As he says in the article, it’s good to have all the liner notes and open-endedness to burn and rip… Well, this Beastie bullshit notwithstanding.

Though I hear the packaging is incredible…

I don’t think that the big labels will ever come around, but I think it’d be great to obviate labels altogether. I’m down with bands making their own music and giving it all away, and making money off of live shows…

Oh right…
Yeah, the label is sucking money out of me either way. I do like having the disc as well.. for about 10 seconds while I encode the music to mp3 and then put the cd away and never touch it again. Of course, I may touch it again when I want to re-encode all my music into mp8 in 2013 or something, though.

Celine Dion put out a CD with some stupid DRM on it awhile ago. I didn’t really care because I didn’t want the Celine Dion cd anyway. Nothing personal!