Jello wrote: You sound awfully upset about such great news :)
If you think this is great news, you are doing it wrong. Did you read the part about the 30% price hike on the songs that most people buy the most? Under the earlier deal with EMI, each buyer could decide whether to pay more (30% more) to have Apple "leave out" the DRM. Now they have determined that it's better for everyone if buyers aren't burdened with that confusing decision. Instead, everyone will (usually) pay the higher price. The market analysts that blurbed for this article pretend to be hopeful about the reduction in price for the neglected back-catalog items. This is a charade; Apple and/or the labels get to set the thresholds that define the boundaries between the 0.69, 0.99 and 1.29 categories. Steve Jobs may be underweight, but he knows how to run a business. This new agreement is a margin-positive change for Apple. In other words, under the new plan, customers will be paying more for less total product. Brad Stone was inclined to put a positive spin on this, writing that "the majority of songs will drop to 69 cents beginning in April." By "majority" he means the bulk of crap that no one wants any more, if anyone ever wanted it at all. See Magician's Choice: In a typical example of the Magician's Choice, the magician will ask a spectator to make an apparently free choice among several items. No matter what choices the spectator makes, the magician ends up with the item which he wanted the spectator to choose.
When Chris Anderson talks about the long tail, there's a reason why he focuses on Rhapsody and not iTunes. People who want to rummage around in the "long tail" (i.e., back catalog) are more likely to choose a subscription service. In 2006, according to Anderson, the top 100 artists represented ~35% of sales volume at iTunes. The definition of the $1.29 category is probably more like the top 5,000 tracks, which might encompass 60-75% of the sales volume. Then you have 20-30% of volume at the $0.99 price point, and just 5-10% of volume in the $0.69 category. Depending upon how much the price hike drives down unit sales, they might define the $0.99 bin somewhat more expansively. But don't expect anything in the Billboard 100 to be in the $0.69 bin. Real demand has been falling sharply for years now, whether you look at units sold or minutes listened. Raising (most) prices by 30% in the face of the weakest consumer confidence in the history of recorded music might not be the end of the world, but it certainly isn't Great News. It isn't even Good News. RE: Apple Drops Anticopying Measures in iTunes | 
