it seems inevitable that we’ll begin to buy mp3s online the same way that we moved from vinyl to tapes and from tapes to cds. recently, we’ve seen a wave of online music distribution spring up with apple’s itunes music store leading the pack of other copycats, most notable of which is buymusic.com. being the second generation of online music stores, they hoped to learn from the mistakes of previously unsuccessful attempts such as emusic, rhapsody and their bastard uncle, the notorious napster. aside from convincing the general public to buy into yet another medium shift, there are many other barriers that these online stores must overcome. for example, none of these retailers have as large a selection as your local record shop, whereas the opposite should be true. you’re buying from a centralized source so there should be even more selection. that’s like saying your dictionary only contains entries for words with 4 syllables or less. in the end a lot of these problems result from the bureacracy of the record companies and the fact that they’re still operating as if they’re in the brick & mortar world. on the other hand if they do resolve these issues, i still wouldn’t use their services. back when the first music retailers showed up on the web, they were not very user friendly. they placed many restrictions on what users could do with the music they downloaded; some services only allowed a set number of songs to be burned, some didn’t allow any to be burned. those restrictions along with having to pay for these restrictions turned a lot of people off these services. then along came the itunes music store, who cleverly convinced the record execs to loosen these restrictions and even lowered the prices to boot. being that these were two very large improvements on the entire online music industry, itunes was quite successful. of course there were many more people who felt that the price to pay to legally download a song was still too expensive, i being one of them. regardless of how record companies spin their numbers, the public opinion thinks that distributing music on the web is free (or at least much less than in the physical world). the record companes cannot hope to continue using the artifically inflated economics they use to sell cds, and while it seems like they have begun to re-evaluate their pricing (they receive 66c out of every 99c track sold on itunes) it hasn’t reached a stage where it can compete with free. in a conversation i was having with my friend peter, we were discussing at what price would we start buying music online. i decided on a price of 10c a track, and after more calculations i figured that my max would probably be 20c a track. that’s a 80%+ discount on current prices, i don’t think it’ll ever happen. my reasoning (other than being a cheapass) is that when i download music on the web, i do so whimsically (and i’m not going to pay 99c every single time). if i see an artist whose songs i liked before, i might just download their entire album and take a listen. this is like going to a record store and listening to a cd, they let you do that for free in real life. so why force me to pay a premium for an entire cd when i might just listen to it once and delete it? i know i can probably stream the music for free, but what if i want to listen to it later? what if i’m not connected to the internet then? i don’t think it’s fair that they try to sell a cd for an arbitrary high price assuming that you’ll get 99c of utility out of every single track, most of the tracks are just filler anyways. so here’s what i say, sell most tracks for 20c and hit singles for more. i’ll probably hear those singles on the radio and like them so then i will be willing to pay more, but otherwise i’m not shelling out $10 for an album without physical artwork and case.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: geeky, music