Apple Shifts iTunes Pricing; $0.69 Tracks MIA
Hodejo1 writes “Steve Jobs vowed weeks ago that when iTunes shifted to a tiered price structure in April, older tracks priced at {content}.69 would outnumber the contemporary hits that are rising to .29. Today, several weeks later, iTunes made the transition. While the .29 tracks are immediately visible, locating cheaper tracks is proving to be an exercise in futility. With the exception of 48 songs that Apple has placed on the iTunes main page, {content}.69 downloads are a scarce commodity. MP3 Newswire tried to methodically drill down to unearth more of them only to find: 1) A download like Heart’s 34-year-old song Barracuda went up to .29, not down. 2) Obscure ’90s Brit pop and ’50s rockabilly artists — those most likely to benefit from a price drop — remained at {content}.99. 3) Collected tracks from a cross-section of 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s artists all remained at {content}.99. Finally, MP3 Newswire called up tracks in the public domain from an artist named Ada Jones who first recorded in 1893 on Edison cylinder technology. The price on all of the century-old, public-domain tracks remained at {content}.99. (The same tracks are available for free on archive.org.) The scarcity of lower-priced tracks may reflect the fact that the labels themselves decide which price tier they want to pursue for a given artist; and they are mostly ignoring the lower tier. Meanwhile, Amazon’s UK site has decided to counter-promote their service by dropping prices on select tracks to 29 pence ({content}.42).”
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