Comments on: Amazon, Wal-Mart Follow Apple’s Lead, Introduce Variable Pricing

By: dave

dave — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 22:12:00 +0000

“Amazon, Wal-Mart Follow Apple’s Lead” is a totally misleading title. All three retails have the price of songs set by the major music labels.

How can this NOT be collusion with all the labels banding together to raise prices at the same time?

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 19:11:51 +0000

Isn’t this Price Collusion? I hope somebody sues them and RIAA.

By: Jason

Jason — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 17:59:54 +0000

This is just greed. Here we are in a down economy and they are raising prices. This just blows my mind. I hope that they see a significant decrease in the number of downloads. I spend on average about 20 bucks a month on iTunes and I will not pay $1.29 for music. The variable pricing is a joke and my hunch is that the more popular a song becomes the chance of a price jump for it increases. Total clowns driving the car fueled by nothing more than greed.

By: Lee

Lee — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 17:48:17 +0000

I’ve never pirated music and I don’t intend to start but I just refuse to purchase anything that would support these greedy bastards. I guess I could search for the cheap or .99 titles but at this point even those just feel like a rip-off. These price hikes across other retailers prove this was never about DRM. In my use DRM has never even been an issue. So the record companies have driven me away. Really, I hope these greedy, incompetent companies just die.

By: Infophiliac

Infophiliac — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 16:40:17 +0000

There is still one downward pressure on the prices: piracy. When iTunes, followed by the others, started offering reasonably priced downloads, the consumer had a choice of dealing with P2P, which frequently returned corrupted files, a risk of prosecution, and a real time suck looking for the right file, compared to the much more streamlined experience offered in legal channels. It wasn’t just that people wanted to be ethical, Apple et al. were also selling an improved UX.

If prices do creep back up to the point where the cost of a single track is significant, a lot of people who did cost/benefit analyses and decided it was worth their money to have the more pleasant experience of a legal download will do those analyses again, and this time, their judgment may once again be to the labels’ and retailers’ detriment.

I’m not advocating the use of piracy, just pointing out that from a pragmatic level, it still represents a pressure on prices.

By: What to read on the GigaOM network

What to read on the GigaOM network — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 16:31:40 +0000

[...] Staff | Thursday, April 9, 2009 | 9:31 AM PT | 0 comments Amazon, Wal-Mart follow Apple’s lead with variable pricing (TheAppleBlog) Why rumors of an e-book reader from Barnes & Noble make sense (jkOnTheRun) [...]