

Price as Signal: The recording industry is lying about why they want different prices (2005) - divia
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/11/18.html

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mechanical_fish
The proper link:

<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/11/18.html>

I remember this article well.

This hypothesis would explain why variable pricing has arrived on iTunes now:
It was a _quid pro quo_ to convince the music industry to let Apple sell the
100% DRM-free music that it needs to sell in order to compete with up-and-
comers like Amazon.

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ambition
Let's accept the assumption that iTunes pricing doesn't obey the rule of lower
price implying greater volume. For the theory to hold up, iTunes would have to
represent a significant share of an artist's total revenues. Otherwise the
artist wouldn't be bothered by a decrease in iTunes sales volumes.

But! As the importance of iTunes sales grows, an artist's incentive to keep a
record label as distributor diminishes. Any artist can list themselves on
iTunes - why would they share revenue with an evil record company if they
don't need help with distribution and marketing?

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notaddicted
There is an extra slash on the end of the link.

