Arrogant and greedy are two adjectives that could be used to describe many groups in this country but none more so than the recording industry. Some executives at the big music distributors think that the price of legal downloads – 99 cents for most single songs, $9.99 for albums – is too low. They want a "bigger slice of the fledgling market’s spoils" and have been pressuring iTunes to raise the price. After all, they claim, the current prices were just "introductory".
Poor babies. Consider that the companies reportedly get 65 cents for each song sold (and you know most of that money never gets to the artist). Since they have almost no distribution costs in the case of online stores, the largest chunk of that payment is pure profit, especially on their older material and recordings by newer, less established artists. Apple and the other companies are the ones who pay for the servers, bandwidth and development costs out of their 34 cents.
Remember, this is the same group that has whined for years about all the money they’ve supposedly been losing to illegal downloads. It doesn’t occur to these idiots that part of the reason for this underground trade is that they charge too much money for a CD that often contains only two or three good tracks. Now they want to overcharge for the digital version of those two or three good tracks as well. As I said, arrogant and greedy.
[Thanks to As The Apple Turns for the link.]