Amazon Follows iTunes' Variable Pricing Lead
Posted 04/08/09 at 03:00:00 PM by Paul Lilly
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Say it isn't so, Amazon! Taking a page from iTunes' recently announced (as in yesterday) variable pricing scale, Amazon has decided to follow suit just one day later. Boo, hiss!
Apple's iTunes yesterday introduced a variable pricing model where songs sell for $0.69, $0.99, and $1.29. The move earned Amazon some short-lived praise for staying under a buck, but that all goes out the window today.
To be fair, the blame more than likely goes to the music studios, who may have raised prices in exchange for serving up DRM-free titles. Amazon and Apple aren't alone in switching to variable pricing, as it appears to have also affected Real's Rhapsody store and Lala. Prices are up at Wal-Mart too, with some songs reaching $1.24.
Is there a way to get a list
Submitted by jcollins on Thu, 04/09/2009 - 10:37am
Is there a way to get a list of the top songs with their prices on Amazon? I can see it in iTunes, but I don't see the comparable on Amazon for the top songs (you can look at the album level, but it isn't the same thing).
?
Submitted by Kaasiim on Thu, 04/09/2009 - 6:31am
i thought competition was supposed to bring prices down?
Competitive pricing gone wrong.
Submitted by rruscio on Wed, 04/08/2009 - 3:29pm
I buy the CD, sometimes new but usually used, rip it to FLAC, convert that to the highest bitrate MP3 Lame can do, lose the case, store the paper and disc, and have all my stuff on disk.
Why download this crap? For those "few songs"? Remember radio?
rr
Submitted by Vegan on Wed, 04/08/2009 - 4:02pm
What you do sounds like a lot of work. THAT'S why.
Submitted by tehR0XX0Rz on Wed, 04/08/2009 - 1:38pm
When Sony encodes and prices downloads as well as AllofMP3.com/MP3Sparks, then I'll buy music from them. I'm sure as hell not paying 69 cents for a 128kbps piece of crap.
And they wonder why people
Submitted by Geeksquadmyss on Wed, 04/08/2009 - 1:18pm
And they wonder why people pirate music? Because at 1.29 a song (Any new or popular music) will be priced higher. This gives them the ability to raise prices yet still appear to lower costs by lowering the price of music no body fucking buys! How can they justify raising the price of music?
So Typical...
Submitted by Brock Kane on Wed, 04/08/2009 - 12:52pm
Kick the economy while it's down! Way to help out the average "lucky to be working" guy. The Greed never ceases to amaze me!
There is no album cover, there is no CD, there is no trucks delivering the music, there is no sales people to pay, there is no store to stock pile the music, there is no manufacturing plant to mass produce the music....it's a simple "digital" file that is shared over and over as many times as needed to sell to the consumer......and they want the price to go up????
Are you f---ing kidding me????
This is why I will never ever buy any digital music. Long live P2P!!!
What a country!
"This is why I will never
Submitted by MrE on Wed, 04/08/2009 - 4:16pm
"This is why I will never ever buy any digital music. Long live P2P!!!"
So, you cannot afford the higher price, so it justifies stealing it? Good job. =p
As to the guy who rips to FLAC and then to MP3... really? WTF? Rip it to AIFF or WAV which is 2 channel PCM and convert to any lossy format you desire. No need to rip to a compressed lossless format unless you are hurting on hard drive space.
Submitted by bobthegoat2001 on Thu, 04/09/2009 - 1:09am
Flac is more compatible than AIFF. Flac also supports tags, Wav doesn't and I'm not sure about AIFF.
And why not save space when you can? Flac is lossless so why not use it? When you have hundreds of CD's like I do, fully uncompressed CD's can take a lot of space.
It just makes it easier to to just have the tags in Flac and just to convert directly to MP3 (for my portable player). Once they bigger sized MP3 players are more common (like 120gb or bigger) then I can just use Flac without the need for MP3.
Submitted by lostcause64 on Wed, 04/08/2009 - 11:47am
The music studios are really earning anything that happens to them these days. While I don't pirate music myself, out of respect for the artists that make the music I enjoy, I can't fault anyone that does pirate music because of crap like this.
The record labels are every bit as greedy and corrupt as the Wall Street tools that created the economic mess we're all in now. As far as I'm concerned, the technology exists so that the labels are totally obsolete and irrelevant. With the internet and digital downloads, musicians/artists/bands can easily create and promote themselves without the bloated middle-man called the record industry.
John
Try to be smarter than the object you're working with! It will make things easier, and might just save your life...
Submitted by ogremustcrush on Wed, 04/08/2009 - 11:27am
Wow. Right when it was getting to the point where users might actually buy music instead of pirating it, they go and do this. The DRM was a big hurdle in getting people to buy music, now that it is crossed, why put up another hurdle by raising prices? The music studios need to remember that they are competing with a cost of free but slighly inconvienient. If their products can't be both more convienent than piracy and not have too high of cost, they are only hurting themselves.
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