iTunes Store now infected with variable pricing, Amazon still $0.99
By Thomas Ricker 
posted Apr 7th 2009 4:34AM
posted Apr 7th 2009 4:34AM
in April, based on what the music labels charge Apple, songs on iTunes will be available at one of three price points-69 cents, 99 cents and $1.29-with many more songs priced at 69 cents than $1.29.Regardless, we know where we'll be purchasing our Miley Cyrus from now on.
[Thanks, Jesse]
Read -- January "Changes Coming to the iTunes Store" press release
Read -- iTunes top songs [Warning: iTunes App link]
Read -- Amazon top songs
Uk prices still ain't changed, thank god, but for how long?
Why would it be a problem if iTunes DID change the UK prices? You still have other options...you just seem very dismissive of them. Example, I'm about to get Motown 50. Amazon mp3 £7.49, iTunes £9.99 (with my email address embedded in each track...cheers Apple)
Your options are still better on CD Amazon = £7.98 / Play.com £7.99.
Exercise your options and don't let companies like Apple feel they have you over a barrel...we all lose when you do that.
Actually, they have (http://img17.imageshack.us/img17/5271/picture1zhw.png)
Prices are now 59p, 79p, 99p. Yet to see any 59p songs. Most seem to be 79p (the old price). There's a couple of 99p songs, too.
The UK Prices HAVE changed - most of the top 10 are now 29p at Amazon! Check out the comparison of the top 10:
http://froggypic.com/image/04/26e06a43dcdfa30c70a775a2937f00c6.png
Fuckin hell. Amazon hiked prizes too
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13526_3-10214556-27.html
Yup, Amazon now has the same tiered pricing. The fact that they didn't wait for at least a few days tells you that this is a recording industry move. Apple is the elephant in the room for on-line sales and once they capitulated, the rest had no choice. At least we don't have to worry about obsolete DRM any more (which only penalized legal downloaders) and perhaps this will give people second thoughts about mindlessly buying the top 10 tunes just because they're popular.
I have yet to see any $0.69 songs. Not that they aren't there, but I haven't found any. Funny enough though... some oldies but goodies I thought would be $0.69 are now $1.29... songs like Thriller, Superstition, Ain't No Mountain High Enough, etc. You'd think they'd at least stay at $0.99.
When will the labels work with and not against simple pricing and DRM-less files with Apple?
I was just thinking the same thing. I gave up trying to find $0.69 priced songs after 15 minutes.
I can beat that!!! I went to the Top Songs on the main page and noticed that the Crack a Bottle - Single by Eminem was $1.29, then I went to the Hip-Hop main page and in the Top Songs it is listed for 0.99 !?!?
Conspiracy? I think so...
Stupid? I know so...
all your songs are belong to us!
those songs probably still sell reasonably well though
yeah i was just gonna say...all the songs you mentioned as oldies but goodies are still good sellers too....thus the price increase...
they say most songs will be 69c b/c 90 percent of the songs on itunes dont sell compared to top 40 (which will soon be all 1.29).
*prays indie scene stays at 99c or drops to 69c*
If I paid for all of my music, I'd have wasted $1600 of my money.
I found one! Lol I remember seeing this post a while ago and I was just scannin the iTunes store to make sure I had my shit organized right and found one so I had to comment. People of the Sun--Rage Against the Machine. I'm kinda surprised, that's a good song too.
They are doing it wrong. If you have an "explicit" label, you can charge a dollar more if you want.
So, if anything variable pricings do is to make things mor expensive, I think I'll stick with nonvariable prices...
Apple never wanted variable pricing. The labels are trying everything to remove iTunes' dominance:
- They tried making every other store DRM-free. No good, people still went for the DRM-ed iTunes. Apparently, none of the "real people" cared, it was all technology people.
- Now they're trying to force iTunes to be more expensive for the most popular songs. People may not understand DRM, but they understand money. If it doesn't work, at least the labels are still making more.
"We know where we'll be purchasing our Miley Cyrus from now on."
Sorry Engadget, but from that picture, Miley Cyrus is still lovable at $0.99
That means they will buy Miley Cyrus from iTunes~
Even if it were 1.29, Engadget would still buy it from iTunes, because they're Apple-crazy
no the point here is that you can identify a Miley Cryus song just from the title..
So, what the music companies are doing is forcing the largest retailer of their products to charge more. These guys are geniuses! We should get them to sort out the economy with their top notch business savvy!
Miley Cyrus? Pah, its all about Lady GaGa, judging from the Top 10 list!
Btw, this price change won't affect me in the slightest anyway, since I've never even listened to almost all of those songs listed above.
piracy-la-la-la-la-la!!!!
The music industry don't like Apple having so much power & marketshare - so looks like they will force their prices higher to shift people to alternate stores, and thus lower Apples power
can I have some of your kool-aid?
@crescentdavid
You don't think that is true? That's been well known for the last few years and is why Amazon has been able to sell DRM-free tracks when Apple weren't, beyond EMI tracks. The recording industry is fed up with not having the power.
One wonders what would happen if Apple were to create their own record label and compete directly with the Big 4.
@Kelmon
Apple Corps would ream them a new one.
Good call Genius.
One wonders why Apple would want to be in such a shitty commoditized business model that shrinks every fucking year when they can sit back and make billions selling iPods and iPhones.
Holy shit, I'm a genius!
*sells Warner Music stock and buys Apple!
@insky
Good point - I forgot about that. I'd suggest this be settled in a fist-fight between Steve and Yoko but I suspect that Yoko would whupp Steve into a bloody pulp.
Apple Records is done. Apple bought them out for like a Billion dollars so they couldn't sue anymore! (Paul's divorce probably helped) Then licensed the "Apple Records" name back for Apple Records to use for like a dollar without the nasty strings from the past. It was a big deal last year when they changed their name from Apple Computer to Apple Corporation.
Steve can do whatever he wants now.
Actually Amazon UK have reduced some songs to 29p from 79p today!
Yep, I saw this aswell.
Makes you wonder if they are making money at 29p or if this is a lost leader so to speak.
Even though I am a blatent Apple fan boy (iMac / Mac Mini / Iphone / Airport Extreme / Airport Express / In Car ipod 30GB) this would make me switch. I would rather have music truely DRM / Device locking free/
Makes me wonder what their markups are on the other stuff they sell.
Full price for lossy music distributed digitally is crazy.
Now watch as the music labels force Amazon to change its 0.99 music pricing.
Although, i am willing to pay more for drm-free tracks versus drm ones.
Apple did the right thing. Down with DRM!
"Although, i am willing to pay more for drm-free tracks versus drm ones."
They're both DRM free. iTunes no longer has DRM on it's AAC tracks, mp3 can't actually have DRM protection.
I don't really see your point.
They removed alot of content from the iTunes store in making everything DRM-free, though. You can no longer download TMBG's The Spine anymore, for example.
There is still DRMd content on Itunes. The majority of the new stuff is good to go, but some of the foreign tracks and obscure Jazz Joints are DRMd. I think there may be a bit of overzealous (read false) advertising on the part of Apple in this regard. The thing that ticks me off about Apple is how they've been so nice to charge me $600 to convert my existing DRM tracks to DRM free. Needless to say, my Itunes purchases have dropped significantly. I will however agree with some of the other posters, that this may be due to the Record goons trying to get back at Apple, when they really should be thanking them, as e-music, amazon and a host of others have followed Apple's formula, which basically gives consumers a compelling reason not to pirate. I would venture to say the music Industry would be alot worse off if it wasn't for Apple.
I'm never buying any songs ever again, to much of a burden to protect multi thousand dollar libraries, I using my 120 GB zune and it just is a better music experience then anything else. Fuck massive libraries, if I can find the music I want I'm happy, and I ALWAYS find the music IU want on the zune store.
I love my Zune too, but dial it back a notch. You sound like a shill.
Any music environment will require that you back up the music. Subscription is great to explore new music, but some stuff you want to keep permanently.
Too much of a burden to protect? I have a copy on my computer and a copy on my iPod. If anything happens to one or the other I can restore from the remaining. How hard is that?
Have fun renting music.
+1 for rented music!
but...... it's nye impossible to restore music from an iPod if you have to reinstall iTunes / your OS because Apple is such a bastard and gives you only the option of formatting or not recovering your music - Another stupid move by Apple
@tcc3
you do get to keep some stuff permanently because when u have a Zune subscription you get to purchase 10 songs at no charge monthly,DRM-free 320kbps MP3. also every now and then they have a couple of newly released popular albums for like $.99 cents only and still that DRM-free criteria from above. best deals in town i think.
na, shills aren't as stupid as me, It's just that I have had an ipod 120 classic, ipod touch 2nd gen 8gb, ipod nano 2nd gen 2gb, and none of them have matched up to the experience for music, and even the some types of video look way better on the zune then even my beloved ipod touch, but if your a big internet fan get the ipod touch hands down, it's easily the best of any mobile internet browser out their, and I have played with windows mobile phones (even 6.5, it's cool but I'd wait for mobile 7), blackberrys, their nice, the bold is the best, palms, out dated, symbian (N95) cool, but it could do more, wel you get my point, and none of them get anywhere near as good, maybe the htc touch hd in some ways, but thats $800
Miley Cyrus? now that is shameless.
Variable pricing to pay for variable bit rate?
Gah, this is the worst timing for Microsoft to move their Zune servers. I was going to post a picture of how the top ten songs on the Zune marketplace are still the same price at 320Kbps DRM free MP3's
http://i39.tinypic.com/2lvyfj6.jpg
i support what you're trying to do here - but go ahead and include prices in that screen-shot of yours - makes it easier to make a point about pricing....
i'm a zune user too. huge win for us. we don't have to flinch every time we hit the "download" button.
Phen:
There are no prices listed because they are a ZunPass user. They can dowload any of those songs to their zune as part of their $15/month subscription.
If they want to transfer the file to something other than an X360, PC, or Zune they can convert it to DRM-FREE mp3 format. ZunePass lets you download 10 mp3 files a month in this manner, AFTER the 10 downloads are reached it is 99¢ for each additional song you want in MP3 format.
There is NO LIMIT on the number of songs that have DRM with ZunePass.
Nothing beats the bittorrent price!
Or the usenet discount (well okay it usually isn't free, but its worth it maxing out the connection speed every time).
alt.binaries.sounds.flac
lossless sound ftw.
bittorrent prices rose 300% today! Oh noes!
if you want music pay for it!
Plastic but...
Good thing that there are no songs in the top ten i would even consider listening to.
Just noticed the price change on the Australian music store ($2.19, up from $1.69).
People that buy shitty mp3s need to be charged more. Seriously, get a cd and rip it.
mp3 have no drm.
fail.
he never said they did.
fail.
but we know what he ment thx
No. mp3 is shitty quality and you are paying for it. If its shitty quality, you might as well either rip it from a cd to whatever format you want - or - download it for free but still get the cd later. Chumps who pay for mp3s need to get buttraped more.
I'll see how things pan out with the UK iTunes Store. At the moment I'm happy to stick with the iTunes Store just for sheer convenience but if the price differential becomes high enough then I'll give Amazon at try and see how well their offering works. Mind you, it looks like they might block my attempts to buy since I'm not currently living in the UK (iTunes simply needs a UK credit card).
Have you tried Amazon? It's totally seamless. To be fair I've only JUST used it for the first time myself, but as soon as I checked out it started the downloader and each track was instantly added to iTunes.
No, not yet and I suspect that I can't given the "Amazon MP3 is currently only available to UK customers" message I am seeing (sounds like it has detected my IP address is outside the UK). Regardless, Amazon is never going to be 100% seamless when compared to iTunes simply because it isn't integrated into iTunes itself; iTunes will not interact with Amazon directly and you need to switch applications to browse the Amazon store. For the time being I am happy to pay for the convenience of iTunes. I realise that this won't be a popular decision but I'm honestly not that bothered and have no intention of encouraging a rush to a bargain basement.
If it comes to it, it sounds like I could use Play.com's service since they only require a UK billing address and I still have one of those. Unfortunately, Play.com has absolutely no integration with iTunes or anything else for that matter so convenience is definitely sacrificed for price benefits.
Oh, yes... because it's so painful to switch to your web browser, click the "buy MP3" link, tell your browser to open the file in the Amazon Downloader, and watch as the downloader downloads it and adds it to your iTunes library. Yes, that is painful...
Don't be so flippant. Of course it isn't "painful". It is, however, obviously less convenient, which is my point. If you don't mind switching applications and the lack on integration with your library then that's fine with me and I'm not going to berate you for not choosing to use iTunes. Is it unreasonable for me to expect the same from you?
Cmon guys, amazon offers horrible quality...re-encoded 64kbps mp3s ->320kbps. I know because my cousin works at amazon's encoding computer room.
Do you get some sort of buzz from lying? Is there profit in it?
Basically is the attention I'm giving you all you're in it for?
dunno if anyone else has noticed, but having tried both I tend to find the amazon tracks are louder, and align better with all my other music. All my recent itunes purchases have sounded really quiet, and since apple don't do any form of sound levelling on their ipods it gets a bit annoying, so i'll be purchasing all my tracks from amazon from now on
iPods do sound levelling. It's in the preferences somewhere.
Its called "Sound Check" however it only levels track by track.
If you want them leveled by album you have to use iVolume.
Do people really buy songs from iTunes ?
It's pretty easy to download songs over the internet.
Or yet record them thru streaming.
"Do people really buy songs from iTunes ?
It's pretty easy to download songs over the internet."
Eh?
iTunes is using the internet..
And if you mean by "downloading songs" meaning using Limewire or whatever for free (illegal), then you're in the wrong post. This is about legit music
"Do people really buy songs from iTunes ?"
That'd be one of those rhetorical questions, yes? Given that iTunes seems to be the #1 online music retailer these days, I think you can safely answer your question with a "yes".
"Now, if you believe Steve (someone who originally postured against this price structure)"
Steve Jobs at variable pricing: "can't read my, can't read my, no he can't read my poker face"
fuck you apple. Majority of the tracks are still $1.69 in the top ten, but there's a couple that sell for $2.19. Agh.
(Australian iTunes Store)
You actually blame Apple for the price hike? How naive. After you do your research, please re-direct your anger to the proper parties.
I know it is unpopular to blame Apple for anything around here but since NO OTHER ONLINE MUSIC STORE has raised their prices.
Yes, Yes I blame Apple.
Don't be an idiot. Amazon has had variable pricing since DAY ONE. And yes, "variable" does actually mean "more than $1 per track on popular tracks". Have you just not been paying attention?
Paying similar to CD prices for lossy music still doesnt make sense to me.
Convenience is always king and on-demand is pretty hard to beat.
9 out of 10 of the UK amazon store songs are at a killer 29p
you spin me right round baby right round, you spin me right round baby right round..
Oh yes, and europeans pay €1,29 instead of $1,29. Thats like $1,72 ATM. WOW!
Just curious - why can't Apple have the option of buying tracks in FLAC? Then the consumer can encode them into whatever format they want. Although I guess since iTunes doesn't support FLAC, it sorta defeats the purpose lol.
Guess I'm going to Zune Marketplace now...
It seems kind of random and I've been looking and I don't see any 69 cent songs anywhere, this is a ripoff.
I'm glad my Lady GaGa album on sale for $7.99 at best last year.
P-P-P-Poker Face!
I don't buy from iTunes and definitely will NOT now with the higher prices. Are they crazy? Anyhoo, I get tracks for 27 cents over at emusic.com for all you independent labels and indie music crowd out there. If interested, email me if you wish.
I used to buy music from iTunes.... not any more.
MP3sparks.com FTW!
Lady Gaga "The Frame" for $2 (whole album)
Well seen as Miley Cyrus is the same price at both it really wouldn't matter! I just love how Engadget take care in writing their articles!
Limewire till death... U guys can keep sucking steve jobs balls...
Honestly for new music its almost better to buy the CD. I was looking in the best buy flyer and the new rascal flatts cd was 9.99. which is 10.99. So for a $1 more you get far less quality. But if you don' t feel like leaving your house for some reason then sure buy it online. If I hadn't found it last week I would go get it, might still since most of them were only 160kb.
But for hard to find artists itunes and amazon is still a good place.
None so ignorant as the masses that choose to be.
At the slightest hint of a popular scapegoat, fools rush in to judge.
Dining with the Devil is never a scot-free enterprise, as Amazon will discover in the fullness of time. They may help the major labels and distributors to apply leverage on iTunes, whose power in the digital downloads market they fear, but posterity will judge if this move will turn up trumps for them, or for the consumers they pretend to support.
I will revisit this topic in a year or two, when hindsight will give 20-20 vision.
By which time a lot of hot-headed spiteful fools posting here would have conveniently forgotten the issues, and would be wondering why they are being royally screwed left and right. As one poster in another blog stated: "Nothing is happening to you that you aren't allowing to happen."
why don't you use another "clever" one-liner.
you sound like a tool.
I recently purchased several catalog CDs for $4.99 new. None of those titles are selling for $6.99 or 69 cents per track. Lower quality continues to cost more!
I'd start buying from Amazon, but I'm not paying for crappy mp3's. AAC is far superior.
Yes, on paper, AAC is better than MP3.
Unless you do something really stupid (really old mp3 encoder, really bad settings) the quality difference at 256 kbps should be small to non-existent.
Honestly, I'd rather have mp3s because they play on everything.
Hell, Amazon is the king of variable pricing. Its just a matter of time.
"Regardless, we know where we'll be purchasing our Miley Cyrus from now on. "
Yea, 'cause the $.29 is a deal breaker for anti-mac type engadeteers...