AppleInsider | NBC chief says Apple ‘destroyed’ music pricing
Warning: Rambling tech post ahead.
AppleInsider | NBC chief says Apple ‘destroyed’ music pricing
“We wanted to take one show, it didn’t matter which one it was, and experiment and sell it for $2.99,” he said. “We made that offer for months and they said no.”
NBC misses the point completely here.
To illustrate:
An iPod is the complete opposite of a printer. My printer for example, an Epson Photo R220, was bought for roughly £40. If you want to buy a complete set of ink cartridges for it, that will set you back around £30. The printer came with a set of cartridges, so that puts the value of my printer at roughly £10. Possibly the stupidest pricing model ever conceived, but one that makes Epson a fortune.
The iPod on the other hand, is quite an expensive bit of kit (iPod Classic Black 80Gb - £152 from Amazon), but the songs are incredibly cheap at 79p each.
You get the impression, even if it is just an illusion, that once you have an Apple product such as an iPod, Apple do actually care about you as a consumer. They want you to be able to say “I just heard this really cool song, I can go and buy it now for less than a quid”. NBC are clearly in it for the short term money.
Apple don’t rely on the necessity that something like a printer imposes. I need ink for my printer to work. I don’t need iTunes music to run my iPod (although it’s always a big plus).
Television episodes are the same, if not worse. You can watch an episode of Scrubs on television and think it was awesome (and you’d probably be right), and then go and pay to download a different episode which was terrible. You don’t want to risk wasting money on a bad episode. Whilst you might get potentially hooked on a series, it’s pretty unlikely your work depends on it.
NBC appear to be working on the basis that users will just pay for episodes which they’ve missed and jacking the cost up won’t affect the number of sales.
Yes it will, and more to the point, people won’t trust Apple and NBC. Apple have other products to sell, which is why they want to gain the trust of their customers with pricing that reflects what they’re selling. It’s partly because of trust that people like me will get an iPod and then consider getting a MacBook.