In a spectacularly unsurprising turn of events, record companies are pressing Apple to allow prices to rise above $0.99 per song when their contract expires next spring.
Apple’s Jobs blasted the record industry for mulling higher prices. “If they want to raise the prices, it means that they are getting greedy,” he said at a press conference, adding that if the price goes up, the industry faces a higher risk of piracy.
Hit hard over the past five years by the rapid spread of illegal song copying over the Internet, record companies — Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, EMI Group Plc (EMI.L: Quote, Profile, Research) and Warner Music — have struggled to revamp their business as sales shift to more legal digital downloads from physical CDs.
The music industry was also aided by key legal victories against so-called peer-to-peer services, which allowed users to use the Internet to download music from one another’s computers without permission from artists and labels.
Apple, for its part, played a huge role in setting that transition in motion with its iTunes service, by far the most popular legal Internet music service with about 70 percent share of digital downloads. iPods have a similar share in the digital music player market.
Source: Reuters
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