The music industry is going to drive their industry into the ground, they only have themselves to blame. There have been two articles out in as many days, where the logic of record executives just throws me for a total mindfuck.

Lets start with “Bronfman Fires Back at Apple“.

“There’s no content that I know of that does not have variable pricing,” said Mr. Bronfman at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia investor conference. “Not all songs are created equal—not all time periods are created equal. We want, and will insist upon having, variable pricing.”

“To have only one price point is not fair to our artists, and I dare say not appropriate to consumers. The market should decide, not a single retailer,” said Mr. Bronfman. “Some songs should be $0.99 and some songs should be more. I don’t want to give anyone the impression that $0.99 is a thing of the past.”

Honestly, this guy must be in a singer in a band. A band that is about to break up cause the lead man is so fucking high all the time the band is bound to self-destruct.

To try to masquerade your comment as something that is good for the consumer is just silly. Consumers are not that stupid, and to date, I am yet to hear anyone say ninety-nine cents per song is just too much. They certainly are not going to say it is too little.

To state that no content he knows of has fixed pricing… What cave has this guy been living in for the past 100 years? Newspapers and magazines have always been fixed price, at least, for as long as I can remember. What Bronfman wants, is to treat music like the stock market. This is absurd for more reasons than I care to comment on.

I think the real issue here is that the record companies are getting a ton of data from iTunes, and they are not liking that data. They put 10 million into recording and promotion of a album, in the past, you counted as one sale, and it was subtracted from the 10 million investment. The only way the labels had to track what songs were more popular was via singles, which have pretty much come and gone.

The reason singles were not popular, is that the record label generally decided what singles to put out. They put them out at a increased price, so no one was interested. with iTunes, the record companies are getting new data, they now can see that of a 12 song CD they put out, 1 song is selling 90% of the time, while the remaining 11 songs make up the 10%.

You would think they would like this data, it is after all, data they never were able to get, at least not for free. Surveys are expensive and unreliable. Today, they have a survey model with the iTunes music store where they get the survey for free. You may even argue they are being paid for the survey, since in order to take the survey, you have to buy a song, which they can make money off of.

As far as I can tell, iTunes puts the record label in a better position then they have ever been in before. They are getting tons of free data, near real time trend metrics on what songs to push harder on the radio, and they get the cow, and the friggin milk for free.

What they don’t like about this, is that it drives home that they wasted all that money on 11 other tracks that are not moving. They want to move all 12 racks with the same vigor as the one hit wonder. Not going to happen! Either sign better bands, or get used to it.

Bronfman forgets, that there is the flip side to his assertion, in that, songs that are not popular should sell for less. Of course, there is no mention of that. By his definition, I should be able to pick up Paradise City from Guns and Roses for a few pennies, whereas Holla’ Back Girl should cost me over a dollar. However, there is no distinction, one dollar is the floor, popular stuff gets pushed above one dollar.

Buyers will revolt, I guarantee it. They are going to do one of a few things:
Not buy from that label anymore
Buy the physical CD in a store
Pirate the music or borrow it from a friend

I just so happen to be brave enough to bet the house, most are going to chose options three. In some regards, I hope they do screw themselves. I know better though, somehow, the record companies will simply chalk it up to piracy and all the evils, and never see the correlation of piracy to fucking consumers.

The amusing part of all this, this assumes that iTunes and it’s music accounts for the lions share of music bought. I however, doubt that to be the case. I would bet that iTunes accounts for a small fraction of the music market. How do I know, well, Bronfman’s friend over at Warner says so:

“What if Jobs says 39 cents or 29 cents per download - what then? The industry can say, OK we’ll cut him of - very few people people buy music from digital downloads,” said Nash, who pointed out that most of the music on iPods is from their own collections.

So what is it, do we take Bronfman’s story, and expect to see prices hike upwards, or do we take Nash’s story, and expect none of this to matter, since hardly anyone is using iTunes? These fuckers are getting greedy. They see $3.99 being paid for a ringtone, and they want to get that for a song. The ringtone phenomenon is going to go away. Phones are all going to get good enough and fast enough that you can drop any old mp3 into it, and that can be your ringtone. Days of charging $3.99 for a midi file are coming to an end. And yeah, I know, some phone makers will lock you out from doing this, others won’t, and those will be the phones that sell.

This is what I love about the consumer market. The big guns can only butt fuck us for so long, before we turn around and drop a steamer on them. it is only a matter of time. Sure, things are going to get worse before they get better, and sure, in the end, everyone will forget how evil and greedy the mega corporations were, but we will have gained our rights back.