Edgar Bronfman (head of Warner Music):“That’s not to say we want to raise prices across the board or that we don’t believe in a 99-cent price point for most music, but there are some songs for which consumers would be willing to pay more. And some we’d be willing to sell for less.”
Steve Jobs (head of Apple):“If they want to raise the prices, it means that they are getting greedy…”
Check out the full article here:
Apple, record labels to face off over pricing
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/22/AR2005092201722.html
But seriously, what’s it going to take to get these record execs to realize that in this new day and age, they’re simply not going to reap the same enormous profits that they saw when CDs first came out?! Jobs later hints that changing the rate structure as proposed is only going to encourage piracy…which I would believe isn’t far from the truth. I’m sure there’s still an overwhelming majority that doesn’t pay for its music now, and it’s tactics like these that are keeping the rest of us over on the bittorrent / IRC / usenet side of the fence, not even considering the hassle that is actually paying for our music…
“It’s not that we want to raise prices, no no. Don’t sugar-coat it. We want to gouge people for all the money we fucking can.”