Stay at 99 cents?

The files are lossy compression.

They should be *at best* 50 cents.

I for one am not stupid enough to pay 99 cents for less than CD quality *when I can buy CD quality for that price in the stores*.

End of discussion.

Apparently, anyone who knows what 192kbps means is, according to Apple, an Audiophile, and thus not their target market for this service.

Personally, I think that's not a bad stance for them. The sheep will continue to feed on the slop they shovel out and the rest of us will pay a premium for our high quality.

Yeah, I can buy a CD for $10 bucks...but am I going to like every song on it? I can buy 10 songs from iTunes for $10 and I will at least like each song, even if the quality is questionable.

Hurray Steve!

I agree with Jobs too. Good on him for sticking to his guns, yet again.

On a side-note, if iTunes started offering lossless formats too, I might be willing to pay a little more than $1 a song. Well, not that I can buy them yet anyway, we're still waiting for our iTunes store locally. :P

Pay more for lossless?

Not a chance.

50 cents for lossy and $1.00 for lossless.

That a FAIR price.

Mind you, it's not as if Apple was ever interested in a fair price - their entire product strategy revolves around selling trendy, overpriced status symbols (and oh yes, that assuredly includes that overpriced junk known as the iPod).

From where I'm sitting, his comment will make him the darling of the iTunes lemming set but in reality is the height of hypocrisy.

i got to second your opinion of the ipod, sony network walkman is way better and can be bought at the same price.

Sure we should pay more.

Considering the average iTunes subscriber isn't going to care if they're 48Kbps or 256Kbps.

Right now the market(users above)will bear $1 a song. If they think they can push that and still keep 75% of their clientele, they will.

We, the ones who care about quality, aren't their market. They could not care less about us other than to offer us the music straight from CD ($10 for maybe 2 good songs...if we're lucky).

If we stop buying, perhaps they will lower prices, but, since we are such a limited minotiry when it comes to the iTunes sheep, I doubt it.

We'll always pay a premium for premium quality...and right now, on average, premium is anything above 192kbps.

Bravo Steve Jobs!

I applaud Steve for coming out and saying what we are all thinking, that they are greedy.

... and I'm not Apple or Steve Jobs fan.

hey, 99 cents is a good price. raising the price will just increase piracy. Plus you save your time from searching kazza for the files.

who uses krapzzaaa..... just dc it and download whole albums, also searching for tracks/albums dosent take more than a minute, so you dont actually loose any significant ammount of time.

I think the current price is about right, it should definately stay where it is. Good for Apple.

they should lower prices to $.01 or ask for a dollar/month, then i might just start paying for music, there is no way i will pay 'bout $6000, on my student budget.

You buying 6,000 songs this year? *and* you're a student?

Hell, when do you find time to study?

Why do you have to buy 6000 of them? A penny a song is stupid, they can't make money that way. Why don't you just demand they give them to you for free? LOL.

i listen to music when i study, i didint buy 6000 mp3s, that is how many i download/year, and what ever ammount of money thay would charge, with the ever increasing broadband speeds, people would be downloading more, and 100 songs @ lets say $0.2 is 2 dollar, therefore if 1000000 ppl download 100 songs, thats $2000000, enough to pay an artist and record company $200000, if the album contains 10 songs.

EDIT: 6000 songs/year is only 16 songs a day

$200,000 is nothing, do you realize that it can sometimes cost $1,000,000 or more to record an album? That's not including marketing and other costs. The artist doesn't get paid until the record label makes all the money back. So lets say the record label gives an artist a $1,000,000 budget to record. 5 million songs from that album would have to be purchased before the record company sees a profit, and before the artist sees anything. It would be even worse when you consider that Apple or whoever selling the songs has to make some money too.

if the music is good i dont see any reason for 5 million examples not being downloaded, and after you enlightened me of the fact that there are actually other costs aswell, $.10 / song = alot more ppl download (im guessing traffic would increase atleast 10x) = more examples sold = more satisfied customers = no loss of money, or they could do what some mobile phone operators have done.... introduce subscription option to the service... allowing ppl to download as mutch as they want without paying / song.

Damn, you don't have radio where you live? Man, that must suck.

Well it's pretty obvious you have just started college...couple more years you'll better understand how the market works, well hopefully you will...

Anyway...Yahoo Music Engine charges $5-$7/month and you can listen to as many songs as you like on up to 3 computers...and even transfer them to an mp3 player.

If the price goes up at all......even to say $1.05 per song I will stop using iTunes and start pirating again. I've had enough of the RIAA and the MPAA raping my wallet.

God...yeah...cuz $1.05 for a song you'll listen to for years is just way too damn much.

Well.....I guess I shouldn't say I'd leave for just ten cents. That's only $50 more for 300 songs.

I would however leave if they hiked it 20 cents. I have 300-400 songs from iTunes and no way do I wanna pay $100 more for those same songs. :)

I think you're completely missing the point. It's the fact that RIAA is forcing all these price increases...and according to jobs, profit margins are much higher for digital copies and they're making plenty of profit at this point....why are you raising prices then? Uhhh....oh yea, cuz you have no choice, RIAA is a monopoly....they can raise prices at will...just to award their CEO a few million dollars more in his bonus.

RIAA is an organization that represents the record companies. An organisation is *not* a monopoly. Just wanted to clear that up right away.

And yes, this happens to be a free-market economy. Any comapny/corporation/label/artist is free to charge whatever they feel the market will bear.

According to Jobs...you're now believing every word out of this guys mouth?

Dude... if I'm missing the point, the point ain't worth getting.

I wouldn't mind a small increase if quality, alternative formats, and availablility of rarer tracks increased.

But that might just be me.

And I was hoping they'd talk about prices going down! Don't get my wrong, $.99 is a fair price for a song. But I definitely agree that if they go up, piracy will return as he said.

> ... piracy will return ...

I didn't know it had left. Damn, why didn't she tell me she was leaving, I never even noticed. :(

If you read the article XiND you would see that it says the users who turned away from piracy would be going back to it if prices were raised. This was the point heat_fan was trying to get across as well.

Thank you. Obviously I know that it's not gone, but I was just restating Jobs' comments about people going back to it.

Going back to it? People obviously still have no idea of the general separation of "downloaders" vs "buyers". When you can get all the music you enjoy for free, quickly, in a format you can play on your DMP's and car stereos, just about ANY price is "too much".
Likewise, it seems that 99% of the poeple using itunes have no knowledge, or desire to learn and go through the work, of finding "free" audio. You aren't going to lose these people to piracy, you're just going to lose them. But at least they'd probably fall back to conventional CDs.

And IMHO, $.99 is NOT a fair price. Half my albums have 15+ songs on them. That means if you buy all the songs, you're looking at ~$15+. IE: the price of a CD. Only you didn't get a CD with full quality audio and a case and visuals (liner notes and what not).. you got a chunk of files in all their crappy compressed not-quite-full-CD-quality meadiocreness. And in the iTunes case I believe they're not even mp3... so you can't even, say, play them on your mp3 capable car stereo. You pretty much have to buy into the ipod thing and then buy even more equipment to interface to equipment digitally. And no, if you value the quality of audio, an analog line-out will not suffice.

i think they should charge 5 sents per track and add a 94 cent download charge !

Itunes usually offers the entire album for $9.99, so thats not really a correct statement. Also, Itunes music can be burned to a CD with no problem, then re-encoded if you wish (yes with some possible quality loss if you dont encode it into a high bit-rate.) KNOW ABOUT SOMETHING BEFORE YOU MAKE UP LIES