14 DAY TRIAL // With the recent Apple and EMI announcement, everybody was pretty swept away by the implications in terms of DRM and media formats, however, there is also another layer to the announcement, which may not have as big an impact at first sight, but stands to have a major one in the long term? the prices.
While there have been a few people voicing concerns over Apple fleecing them by asking $0.30 more for the new tracks, these have been largely ignored. It's not as if Apple removed the old songs, they are still there, at the same quality, for the same price. However, for those who want no DRM and double the sound quality, the price has to be a bit more, if only for simple reasons such as the additional bandwidth required for streaming them and storage space for keeping both versions of the track on demand. At the end of the day, the new track offers additional value, and that value comes with a price.
But the big deal is not the price of individual tracks, but that of an entire album. While buying individual tracks in the new format may be more expensive, buying an entire album costs exactly the same as it always did. Doing a little math, it becomes clear that buying an album is much more enticing than it used to be. The prices are not compelling enough to drive people who only wanted one or two tracks to get the whole thing, but they are reason enough to give the album format more weight than it used to have. Everybody wins from this arrangement. Users can still shop the way they want, and EMI now has a much stronger album than any of the other labels. While it is still too early to tell how much of an impact the new prices will have on album sales, they are bound to have some impact, and that can only be good news for EMI.