Amazon Declares War: Drops Hit MP3s To 69 Cents
In recent days, the price of most track downloads in Amazon's Top 100 Singles
have dropped to $.69 cents. Many of these same songs sell on iTune's for $1.29 including Katy Perry's "E.T.", Jennifer Lopez's "On the Floor" and Lady Gaga's "Born This Way." Sources tell Hypebot that the labels receive full wholesale payments with Amazon absorbing losses in an effort to attract new customers.
Amazon is stuck at about 10% market share while Apple dominates with 70% of the digital music market. "The average music consumer spends $46 a year on digital music, which is half of what it was last year," Ross Crupnick of researchers NPD told the LA Times. "The question is not whether you can sell a 69-cent track. It's whether you can get a customer to spend $69."
The labels should do something like this with CD pricing. I recently found the CD of Paul Simon’s new album in mid-price at my local chain store. The two pricing stickers on it indicated that they had just priced it down. Needless to say I bought it right away, having grown up to enjoy this man’s music from out of my uncle’s collection. That was a week or so ago. Now, it’s back at the regular list price for no apparent reason and the stacks of the CD that are available are much taller than when I got it. It’s obvious that cutting prices in half is good for sales figures.
Spending more? Well, there are quite a few as yet unreleased independent albums that I’d buy right away if they were to come out on CD. Why don’t the labels realize that the days of selling huge quantities of the same album are over? These days, they must release more to sell more, and I don’t mean more different editions of the same album, but more different albums. It’s too bad that the labels are incapable of that since they have downsized their artist rosters way too much to be able to do it. And the independent labels can only put out one release at a time. A catch 22? No, not for the music lovers because people like me can find the good self-released albums that are out there, which is something that the A&R departments are seemingly not capable of anymore so all that’s left for the big labels promote the expletive out of the homogenized product they have on their roster and try to market the product for the teenage audience to other people as well. But that stuff is mostly artistically boring and thus won’t sell as expected.
Great news for consumers. Bad news for musicians.
Musicians already have to sell around 12,388 tracks per month on iTunes to earn minimum wage.
The article states that copyright owners still receive wholesale payments, Amazon is absorbing the cost.
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