Quote:
Originally posted by sebastian_dangerfield
You can't download lots of bands with back catalogs that consistently sell well. Zeppelin is not on Itunes, nor are the Beatles. The Stones just put their full catalog on Itunes recently. AC/DC, believe it or not, is one of the top ten all time worldwide in record sales. I think they�d rather just keep collecting massive chunks of change from cd sales, rather than have people shop ala carte for those two or three great songs they put out per cd.*
Itunes fucks you on song selection. You can buy every Ray Charles tune except Georgia on My Mind and if you want to buy the one tune from a record that otherwise sucked, Itunes will list that one good tune as �full album purchase only.� But on the balance, Itunes does still save you piles of dough over the long haul.
And I already own the entire AC/DC, Zeppelin and Beatles catalogs, so I don�t really care.
* There are several AC/DC cds which contain ten solid songs (Back in Black, Powerage).
|
I didn't realize that iTunes had the ability to force an entire album purchase. Which makes the AC/DC thing even weirder. I have no idea what the licensing terms look like, but it seems likely to me that the royalty stream to both the artist and the record company would be similar for a purchase off of iTunes as the sale of a physical CD (yeah, its cheaper to buy off iTunes, but you've got no packaging, shipping, breakage, etc. costs).
Of course, the flip side of the forcing buying an album to get a song equation is that I (probably pretty typically) am unlikely to shell out $10-18 for a single song, but I don't even think about the $1 a song they charge me for a single song. So I'd suspect on average they're losing revenue.
