Digital Music Common Ground
Published March 03, 2003
The NY Times takes note of a convergence of the legal digital music services around the price of $10 per month and 99 cents per download:
- Has the music industry found the 99-cent solution to its file-sharing woes?
"Solution" is far too final a term for this business still very much in flux. But after years of denial and confusion, belligerence and panic, most of the big record labels have coalesced around a set of prices at which they will make almost all of their music available to an ever-expanding array of legal online services.
....They all now charge $9 or $10 a month for customers to listen to a pool of about 250,000 songs online, using a technology called streaming. And they charge about 99 cents to download a song and copy it onto a CD, where it can be played in a car or on a home stereo, or converted to a computer file format like MP3 to be shared with others (legally or not).
- But Mr. Rose of EMI argued that the big issue for the music industry is not the subtleties of whether people buy songs or albums, but finding something that music lovers will pay anything for at all. And there is money to be made in volume, he said.
"If all the consumers who pirate tracks today bought them for a buck, that would be a $5 billion a month business," Mr. Rose said, noting that that is twice the size of the music industry today.
- Digital Music Common Ground
- Published: March 03, 2003
- Type:
- Section: Sci/Tech
- Filed Under: Sci/Tech: Internet, Music: News
- Writer: Eric Olsen
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