RobsHouse.net

Joel Spolsky is one of the brightest minds in the software industry. So bright that his light is shining on the music industry, and musicians should take note! His insights on why the recording industry wants different prices for different songs on iTunes is are brilliant.

The skinny is this; if you see two songs on iTunes, one costs $0.99 and the other $2.49, which one would you think is the crappy song and which one is the good song? The $2.49 song must be the good one, right? You get what you pay for, after all. But wait! Who set these prices? The recording industry, that's who. And should we trust them any farther than we can throw their evil butts? NO! Why should they get to decide what is good? They already get to decide what gets played on the radio, and look how good that is.

Joel asserts that the reason the recording industry wants to set the prices is to have a stronger bargaining position when negotiating contracts with musicians. They want to be able to threaten releasing your songs as $0.99 songs (thus indicating that they're crap) in order to get you to "behave". "Behave" means accept less money, produce the music they want you to, bend to their will and clean the toilets on your way out.

To add to the arguments Joel puts forward, I want to mention that I think instead of fighting piracy of CDs with horrible rootkit software (like Sony/BMG), which only ruins your computer and your enjoyment of the product you bought, they should just sell the damn things for less.

CDs, as individual products, are not expensive to manufacture. How many CDs would you own in your collection if they cost $4-5 apiece? I'd own thousands. In fact, I think most people would spend just as much $$$ or more on CDs if they were cheaper. Plus, there would be virtually no incentive to acquire music illegally by downloading it from the internet. Downloading music from filesharing services is too much work, too much risk, and what you get in the end isn't nearly as nice as the real thing. I for one don't want to download files from the internet when I can get a shiny professional looking product from Amazon.com.

I like having the CDs. Sure, I then burn, rip and copy them onto my computer, but only as a way of archiving them and not having to change the CD in the player while I work, or to make custom playlists. This is perfectly legal, and it is how the people I know want to use the product. They want to be able to afford massive collections, and then be able to use them freely. Nobody I know really wants to build their collection by downloading illicit copies.

So message to the recording industry: shove your rootkits up your /dev/null, lower the prices of CDs, and quit trying to bully the artists. Dinosaurs huddle in the corner together... the world is ready for the next generation of media companies who actually get it.