Why?
Many people are curious as to why iTunes now charges $1.29 per song.
There are 3 main reasons for the price increase:
iTunes is losing money to companies such as Rhapsody, Lime wire, and Amazon who charge less or charge nothing for music.
Many record companies/recording artists are charging iTunes more, like something around 65 cents per song rather than 50. Which causes Apple to raise the price of each song.
The final reason that they have claimed is that they increased the sound quality of each of the songs they put up on iTunes.
So, is it worth it to pay the extra 30 cents to iTunes rather than getting cheaper music from Lime wire, Rhapsody, or Amazon? The only bad part about Lime wire is the occasional virus, however that is rare to occur. So, if you download enough music, say over $1,000 dollars worth, and you do get a virus from Lime wire, that is certainly enough to purchase a new computer that will most likely run faster than your old computer. Rhapsody and Amazon are also a way to avoid the $1.29 per song charge, where you can pay a set fee per month or the $1 per song at Amazon.
You choose the way to get your music, just realize how much you spend on iTunes and how much you could save if you use a different method to getting your music.
December 11th, 2009 at 2:27 am
The price increase had nothing to do with iTunes or Apple. As was widely reported last spring (when the change went into effect), the greedy record labels forced iTunes into using a ‘flexible’ pricing scheme so that they could — as they always have — charge more for popular songs.
Apple had fought ‘flexible pricing’ from the very beginning; it was Steve Jobs (CEO of Apple) that believed that every song should be the same accessible price.
So under threat of having the labels pull their entire catalogues from iTunes, Apple had little choice. But, as a trade-off — and to our benefit — Apple got the labels to agree to allow them to sell tracks DRM free (ie. with no copy protection). At least we’d get something for our extra .30c.
Ironically (and really not surprisingly), the very next day Billboard reported that the songs that had increased in price fell in the charts and the songs that stayed at .99c grew in sales.
Greed lost out.