

Price war Amazon launches 69-cent MP3 store for top-selling tunes - jakewalker
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/2011/04/price-war-amazon-launches-69-cent-mp3-store-for-top-selling-tunes.html

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wccrawford
Seems to me that iTunes captured the market because of the amazing integration
with music devices and not the price point. Until someone beats them at that,
I think things will continue as they are.

I'm not an Apple fanboy by any means, but nobody else has produced a device
that makes it so easy to find, buy, and listen to music on the go.

Amazon's Cloud Player is a good start, since it eliminates having to load the
music on to the device, but the player still needs some polish.

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gigawatt
I buy music almost exclusively through Amazon now solely because of the DRM
nonsense iTunes puts on its files. I have several albums that, when I try to
play them on my media computer through iTunes home sharing, gives me the "This
album is not authorized to play on this computer. Please deactivate one of
your authorized computers to add it to this one." Problem is, that 2 of the
authorized computers are in the scrap heap now, and the other ones I still
use.

Whatever convenience buying music directly through my iPhone would offer is
more than canceled out by this inconvenience. I'll admit that I'm not the kind
of music consumer that buys single mp3s though — full album or nothing for me
— so I'm biased in that way.

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allwein
Apple no longer applies DRM at all in their music store.

It still does in the video store though.

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lukifer
I would buy way, WAY more iTunes video if I could re-compress the video to any
format I want, and share it with friends. (I realize that the latter is highly
undesirable to content holders, but video has always been highly social among
my friends, with frequent sharing of DVDs and such.)

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danilocampos
It's about time.

Now let's see the same trend in eBook pricing. Completely inflated for the
moment.

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apress
Tough for them to do anything about that because of agency pricing imposed by
all the major publishers (even Random House recently got on board). Not sure
why that's not collusion, but there you go.

Separately, with free cloud locker storage and now lower prices, should anyone
be buying songs from iTunes anymore?

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danilocampos
Yeah, let the authors sidestep the publishers as time goes on. They'll incur
less overhead (dozens of unnecessary salaries that don't exist), keep more
money and sell their product cheaper. The publishers will have to fall into
line and sell the product at a price more in line with its value.

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rubergly
I think you're ignoring the fact that there's much more to publishers than
just printing a physical copy of a book and shipping it to shelves. There's
marketing, editing, screening, etc. Think what looking for books would be like
if there was no quality screening or editing and you had to wade through an
online catalog of thousands of books of crap just to have the off chance of
happening to see a quality book.

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danilocampos
Oh, sure, that's a valuable service. But it's definitely one that's bloated by
way more salaries in the current model than are really needed.

Moreover, this is the internet age. People develop direct relationships with
people who write things they like. You don't need a publisher to tell you that
you'll want to read, say, Paul Graham's book.

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neuroelectronic
I think both are losing out to the subscription services and streaming. They
should consider buying up one of these companies that offer huge selection for
a low price each month.

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cabose07
I wonder why they settled on '69'.

