May 5, 2003
The Price is Wrong?
This Wired article (via Matt) discusses why Apple’s 99 cents/song might still be too high.
When considering the price, it’s important to move beyond price-per-song, because I don’t think most people think in those terms. Instead, people are going to think in terms of price-per-mass quantity of songs. Though I’m not sure precisely how big that quantity is, I do think the distinction is important.
Let me try to explain it this way: Let’s say that a person is willing to spend 50 dollars per year on music and he wants to acquire 100 songs per year. Let’s also assume that the person wants to use one method of acquiring music; that is, he doesn’t want to switch back and forth between the record store, iTunes, and KaZaA. So, given Apple’s service, this particular consumer would need to spend 100 dollars to acquire all of his music through iTunes. This is above his threshold. Thus, rather than even spending 50 dollars at iTunes, he spends zero.
It’s worth interrogating my assumption that people won’t use multiple services, but I really do think it holds true in most cases. If people habitually download from KaZaA, they will have little reason to suddenly purchase two or three songs from Apple. They’ll just use their default way of purchasing music, because it’s convenient. To get past that, I suppose the person would really have to think it through, consider his budget in a conscious way.
The question then arises: will any current users switch over from KaZaA? Wouldn’t that involve a conscious choice to change their behavior? To some extent, this will be true. But, because Apple’s gotten so much buzz, I think they will be able to win people over. They’ve attracted a lot of people’s attention really quickly – iTunes is THE New, Exciting, Revolutionary, Killer App, or least that’s how it’s being spun. As I noted before, the key is for Apple to keep this going – to get the system onto Windows, to grow the catalog, to market the hell out of it.
Filed by Derek Slater at 5:59 pm under General news
1 Comment
In other words: free download services (except for the specialized high-quality-only trading networks with community controlled entry) are only free if your time has no value to you.
The fact that much of the music industry has decided to target a group with more time than money (the 14-24 age bracket consisting of high-school and college-age people) is clearly turning into a significant strategic blunder on their part. A strategic error they appear to hope to correct by blunt force of law.
Also, take your “a person is willing to spend 50 dollars per year on music and he wants to acquire 100 songs per year” theoretical user… I’d adjust that a bit to “a person is willing to spend 50 dollars per year on music and wants to acquire the 100 best songs of that year” (where “best” is whatever rating criteria they choose, something like the 100 songs they like most). With a record store, that 50 dollars will get you 30-40 songs, but only 3-8 of those “best” songs, since your average music album has 1-3 really good songs and a lot of detritus. With iTunes you might be able to get 50 of those “best” songs. With Kazaa you spend less money and more time, but may not be able to get a sufficiently good quality version of some of those songs at all. With a mixture of iTunes and KaZaA, I might get every song I want for $50.
Personally, as a reasonably well-paid computer professional with an active social calendar and a love of music, 99cents for a song really is fairly close to nothing. I can buy 15 songs for what I spend on coffee in a week. More songs if I happen to want to buy entire albums. If I spend 1-2 minutes with iTunes getting a song vs 5 minutes with KaZaA, I’d consider it a cost savings. (It’d be even at 3minutes vs. 5 minutes, so Apple had better keep it simple, fast and easy)