The biggest story in digital music last week concerned the advent of the MP3 price wars. Apple announced a new pricing system for iTunes worldwide which would change the standard €0.99 per song to a new three-tiered system. Under the change which came about under the pressure of major record labels, the Irish iTunes Store (and the country’s most popular digital music service) now sells songs at €0.69, €0.99 and €1.29, the latter now applied to popular acts like Lady Gaga, The Script and Beyoncé. It has been indicated that the €0.69 price tier will apply to the majority of older back catalogue music in the store.
While it currently makes little sense to charge more for music in times of recession and in a time when a LOT of people get their music illegally, Apple has also said that more tracks will be available at the €0.69 than €1.29 in the long-term and tracks are now sensibly DRM-free, meaning you can play them on any computer or device without restriction.
ITunes customer satisfaction is not the only thing that Apple have to worry about though. In reaction to the news, Amazon UK has slashed the price of the majority of their top-selling songs on their MP3 Store (not available in Ireland at the moment) in order to grab a larger market share from Apple. Amazon are now selling Lady Gaga’s ‘Pokerface’ for just £0.29 compared to iTunes’ UK price of £0.99. The store also offers bargain albums for £3 and a bargain section.
While the digital music big guns battle it out, Spotify – the streaming music site continues its ascent with the news that it has agreed commercial terms with the UK representative body PRS ensuring that songwriters, publishers and composers would be fairly paid for streamed plays, succeeding (for now) where Youtube could not.
Meanwhile spare a thought for the artist in all this. Calvin Harris (who subsequently hit the UK number one top slot) bemoaned the price cuts on Twitter when he saw his track ‘I’m Not Alone’ for sale at Tesco’s download store for £0.57 - “That track took me 2 years! 57p! 2 years! 57p! No wonder music’s on it’s arse x”.
Fri, Apr 17, 2009
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