I had an interesting discussion earlier debating the price of music online and it brought back memories of an argument I had a few years ago with Factory Records legend, genius and gentleman - Anthony Wilson, whom I was lucky enough to work with for a few years. (Sadly, he passed away in Manchester a few weeks ago.)
In the early noughties, Anthony Wilson came up with the idea that £0.33 pence would be a fair, reasonable and popular price point for a downloaded MP3. He went ahead and setup a site called MUSIC33.COM - I argued with him at the time that linking the brand with the price leaves little room for inflation and it sorta loses it's gloss when you change to dollar or another currency. Anyway, while he won/dismissed that argument, the major labels at that time didn't share his vision of 0.33 pence per song - they were still very nervous about the whole online distribution thing - so music33.com faded away as a project.
Which is a real pity.
the music evolution
Yesterday Nokia launched their OVI (Finnish for Door) music shop and their catalogue is HUGE (they bought Peter Gabriels online distribution company OD2.com a few years ago via loudeye) and they've also managed to add more music from Universal Music Group, Sony Music, BMG and Warner Music Group. They are one of the only music shops (apart from Apple's itunes) to have such a large catalogue of music that includes major catalogue. Amazon is going to follow suit soon with their own digital download shop, as will others in the autumn/winter.
So it looks like, almost 10 years to the day when Shawn Fanning rocked the music world with (the original) Napster, that the music revolution is finally going to happen. Despite Apple claiming that it already has happened.
Ipod/itunes music sales over 4 years
100 million ipods sold over 4 years / 3 billion songs sold over 4 years
Which is actually: circa 30 songs per ipod (over 4 years) or Less than 2 albums per ipod (over 4 years) or 8 songs per ipod per year!.
The words pear and shaped springs to mind - Apple have certainly ignited a revolution in portable MP3 players, but, I'm afraid they haven't exactly rocked the music industry world with their music sales. 8 songs per ipod per year is an abysmal result, considering the market share they were handed by the major record labels (Apple had exclusivity to a lot of major label premium digital content).
Now that Nokia, Gbox.com, amazon and many others will be competing with iTunes, with essentially the same music catalogue but without the APPLE iTunes DRM, I think we will see a price war along with the increase in competition.
An interesting side note to the Nokia OVI music launch is that Nokia recently sold 200 million music enabled handsets..which is double the amount of ipods sold by Apple over 4 years.
more choice for consumers on price/quality
While Apple iTunes have obviously got it wrong on many levels (with music sales), another company got it very right, albeit on the edge of the law. This time last year, allofmp3.com was just behind iTunes as the leading UK music download sales shop.
The allofmp3.com pricing model was based on quality - they charged per file size - not by track. In other words, the higher the quality, the larger the file size and therefore more expensive the download. The downloads were DRM FREE and leaving aside the handbags over royalties, it was an incredibly clever idea.
It was also a jaw-dropping idea for the music industry who realised that consumers were actually willing to give their credit card details and personal details to a known-to-be-operating-on-the-edge-of-the-law Russian website to download a low quality version of an album...instead of downloading the full quality version for free on an illegal P2P site.
Which is truly amazing, when you think about it.
So my 2.0 cents on the subject is that consumers totally understand the quality thing - despite the protestations of Apple, who insisted on the all-music-should-be-treated-the-same and one-price-fits-all policy for years, claiming consumers wouldn't 'get it'.
I think music fans do 'get it' and they will happily buy low (128kbps) quality versions of an album, DRM FREE, at a discount from a legitimate site and they will also buy music by their favourite artists in high quality.
The point is, it's quite possible for a record label to sell songs, now, at these price/quality points, without befuddling the consumer:
Low (itunes) quality: 0.33p
Medium (320kbps) quality: 0.79p
High (WAV/AIFF) quality*: 0.99p
- WAV/AIFF being as close as you can get to the quality of music on a Compact Disc.
Dub