iTunes Price Hike Set to Take Effect on April 7
By Ed Oswald | Thursday, March 26, 2009 at 8:49 am
Get ready for it. If you like any current music, it would probably be a really good idea to buy it right now. This is because Apple appears to be set to institute variable pricing beginning on April 7. The price of most popular music would go up to $1.29, including some classic tracks.
In all fairness to Apple, we should also state that some tracks will actually become cheaper at 69 cents apiece, but it is not clear how and what the record industry plans to charge. Package deals of music would also be offered.
I think raising the prices for digital music is a big mistake. 99 cents is a good price (and a fair one too) considering the overhead is much less. I do support however making older tracks cheaper: that just makes good sense.
We’ll know pretty much right away if this price hike will work. A good thing to watch will be P2P traffic: if it spikes, we know consumers are turning back to piracy rather than pay more money. iTunes has a big enough userbase to cause such a shift.
Hopefully like Apple says, most tracks will stay at 99 cents. But I’m not holding my breath as the record industry has proven to be a greedy bunch.
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Latest AppleNews March 26, 2009 | AppleFever.NET | The Hot Apple Blog Says:
March 26th, 2009 at 9:54 am[…] iTunes Price Hike Set to Take Effect on April 7 [?] Share This […]
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iTunes Prices Going Up | News America Now Says:
March 26th, 2009 at 10:30 am[…] iTunes Prices Going Up Click Here for the News America Now home page and the latest news […]
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Bites from the Apple: Tango and Cash — What I Would Buy Says:
March 30th, 2009 at 3:29 am[…] The end of exclusive 99¢ tracks at the iTunes Store will be coming to an end as of April 7, when Apple flips on the variable pricing scheme it promised/threatened at this year’s Macworld keynote. While some newer, hotter tracks will increase to $1.29, many older catalog tracks will sell for as little as 69¢ (via Technologizer). […]
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The Toybox mobile edition Says:
April 6th, 2009 at 11:04 pm[…] eventually, the question was just, when? Update — April 7, 2009: Today is the day of the supposed price hike. I checked iTunes, and although I couldn’t seem to find any priced at 69 cents, I did check iTunes’ […]
March 26th, 2009 at 1:12 pm
I use two music stores, neither which is itunes. Amazon is THE best service out there if you ask me for many reasons – many [popular] songs are .79 cents and albums, when first released, are commonly $5 or cheaper. It is totally web-based (access anywhere) total DRM free, and MOST SONGS ARE VARIABLE BIT RATE (better quality and smaller file size – the other songs are either 256 (itunes bit rate) or 320 (better than itunes, but of course higher file size)). This is the main reason that I am switching from Rhapsody (MP3 music store, not streaming service) to Amazon. The good thing about Rhapsody is that almost every album is under 9.99.
Stores like the two just mentioned are going to become more popular simply because of the price hike at itunes. I know many people are going to stick with itunes and deal with the price hike, but if you ask me itunes’ dominance is very slowly going down the drain.
/rant
April 7th, 2009 at 6:49 am
So it’s just music going up? Not games or movies?
April 12th, 2009 at 5:50 pm
I too, think that the hike will lead to many going to piracy. The 99 cents per song was perfect. Why would they want to ruin it? & Yes, I have not seen anything that is 69 cents either.
May 9th, 2009 at 3:25 pm
I thought I read somewhere that it was going up to $3.00??
May 14th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
The prices are going up and some people will just stop buying music because they can’t afford to buy songs that are $1.99 a piece.
June 20th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
That isn’t right that they are making the prices go up because they have billions of people paying $1.29 and $0.99 was good enough. It is pretty much a rip off because some songs that are $1.29 aren’t even good.
if make the prices go any higher, nobody will be able to buy any songs, then we all will go to another music store or…
GET LIME WIRE!!!!!!!!
That is what I am going to do, so it would be better cause I won’t have to pay a “cent”
July 7th, 2009 at 6:32 am
just another reason why people continue to pirate music, i used to buy music but it would be crazy when the bill came to $50 and half of those i quickly stopped listening to, and this is just ridiculous