All Shook Up, Right Down to the Musical Core – New York Times:
[T]he Universal Music Group let Apple know that it would no longer grant the company guaranteed access to its coming releases. Officially, Universal had no comment, but an executive briefed on the negotiations said the music company was merely interested in keeping its options open as it does with most other retailers in the brick-and-mortar world.
The upshot is that Universal will provide music to iTunes on an “at will” basis. Thus, if someone offers Universal a boatload of cash for the right to sell the latest Bon Jovi or Rihanna singles exclusively on a rival download service, Universal is saying that it is open for business.
It will be interesting to see what requirements Universal puts on any rival service: I assume it will require some DRM or other “protection.” If the rival service offers less flexibility, will it sell as many tracks?
[T]he label chiefs might still hold out hope that Apple will share someday the spoils of each iPod sold — along the lines of how Microsoft agreed to pay $1 for each of its Zune players, introduced last year. But only a million Zunes have been sold, while iPod sales have topped 100 million.
Hope that million dollars has been helpful . . .
Asking why the RIAA cartel thinks they should get a cut from iPod sales is rhetorical: they’re greedy. (You’d think their motto could be “we make money the old-fashioned way: we extort it.”) They have contributed nothing to the development, sales, or marketing of the product — it’s not like you see an iPod promotion in ads paid for by the cartel. True, the iPod is useless without recorded music but so is a radio.
I wonder what the breakout is of online sales vs physical media sales: iTunes crossed the 2 billion track milestone a while back, all while CD sales have been on the decline. And an analysis of sales since DRM-free tracks have been available would be interesting[1][2].
1. Early sales indicate that DRM-free music is noticeably more popular than DRMed music, EMI senior VP Lauren Berkowitz recently told Bloomberg. The world’s third-largest music label began selling its music without copyright protections last month through Apple’s iTunes Store and reports back that sales have been “good.”
Berkowitz said that sales of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon were up 350 percent in the week after iTunes Plus launched. That has since leveled off, but sales of the album are still up 272 percent since going DRM-free. As music industry blog Coolfer points out, digital sales for other EMI artists have risen as well, such as Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream (17 percent), Norah Jones’ Come Away with Me (24 percent), and Coldplay’s A Rush of Blood to the Head (115 percent). During that same time period, CD sales for those same albums dropped by 15 percent, 33 percent, and 24 percent, respectively.