Quote:
Originally Posted by ZodWallop
Price isn't the be all, end all. But it is clearly a factor. In the end it is price and convenience.
In the early days of digital music, the publishers tried to recreate the existing model and it sucked. Napster didn't only succeed because it was free. It was also so much easier than getting music in any other way.
Nowadays, when I remember that other Alphaville song I want, I could probably scour the dark corners of the interwebs and risk a virus to get a free copy. But it's easier to go pay $1.29 at Amazon to get it. I wouldn't be as likely to pay $18.00 for a full album when there's only two songs I'm interested in. (Nowadays, the full album is $9.49. I'm talking about if we were still following the old model.)
Movies don't seem to understand this yet, that's why piracy is much more common there.
You could argue that book publishers figured it out and strangled the e-book market in the cradle rather than face the change.
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Actually Napster when it started wasn't just the easiest way to get music, it was the only way to get music online. The initial iteration of Napster lasted from 1999 to 2001. iTunes didn't start until late 2001, which was also when the first iPod came out . I think that most digital music initially was where people ripped copies of songs off their cd's. I didn't switch to Apple until around 2006. Before then I used windows and linux and had a mp3 player.
If I recall correctly, Jobs insisted on specific price tiers rather than allow the publishers to set their own prices. It took a number of years before most of the publishers put their music on line at the iTunes store. Apple initially wanted to use the same model for ebooks.