{"id":315,"date":"2006-04-24T12:21:56","date_gmt":"2006-04-24T16:21:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/2006\/04\/24\/apple-may-have-won-but-is-that-good\/"},"modified":"2006-04-24T12:21:56","modified_gmt":"2006-04-24T16:21:56","slug":"apple-may-have-won-but-is-that-good","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2006\/04\/24\/apple-may-have-won-but-is-that-good\/","title":{"rendered":"Apple may have won — but is that good?"},"content":{"rendered":"

According to a recent piece<\/a> in the New York Post, Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs — now also known as the King of Digital Music — is close to winning his battle against the four major record labels<\/a>, a battle he has been fighting for the past year or so. On the face of it, the issue is fairly simple: Steve wants to keep prices fixed at 99 cents per song, and the record labels want variable pricing. The reality is a little more complicated.<\/p>\n

The natural assumption is that the big bad record labels want to push prices up and gouge the consumer even further — and let’s face it, that’s not exactly a stretch, given their history of that kind of thing<\/a>. But is having Apple fix the prices at 99 cents a song any better? Sure, there are other music services, such as Rhapsody and eMusice and… well, I can’t think of any other ones (except my favourite, allofmp3.com). Setting the prices becomes a different thing when you control as large a proportion of the market as Apple.<\/p>\n

Fighting the labels on variable pricing keeps prices of new songs at 99 cents, and therefore prevents the record companies from charging more for their big hits — but it also keeps prices of older songs<\/a> at 99 cents, when the record companies might like to (and arguably should be able to) price them lower so they can make some money from their “back catalogue” — although some argue they have no intention<\/a> of doing this. <\/p>\n

So is keeping prices fixed at 99 cents a good thing? It is for Apple, but I’m not so sure it is for you or me (Chris “Long Tail” Anderson isn’t sure either<\/a>). Obviously, a retailer can charge whatever they want for something and consumers are free to go somewhere else — I’m just not sure Steve should be getting all the high fives for digging in his heels on this one.<\/p>\n

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According to a recent piece in the New York Post, Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs — now also known as the King of Digital Music — is close to winning his battle against the four major record labels, a battle he has been fighting for the past year or so. On the face of … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Apple may have won — but is that good?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}