Fucking Record Company Bastards

Steve Jobs's dumpy replacement announced today at MacWorld that all music available on iTunes will henceforth be available in the "Plus" format — 256kbps mp3 with no DRM — along with a tiered pricing model for music - 69¢, 99¢ and $1.29 per song, depending, presumably, on the whim of the studios. The upgraded DRM-free encoding is a good thing, although Amazon has been offering the same thing across a catalog at least as large for some time now. The tiered pricing is somewhat problematic, but, assuming the $1.29 price is for new releases, might conceivably be a bonus, depending on how much catalog stuff is priced at the bottom tier. I've got a feeling we'll see the CD model followed, however, making the 69¢ tier the equivalent of the $8.99 "Nice Price" album while popular older stuff is still flogged at close to 19 bucks.

This has always been utterly counter-intuitive (and a model not followed, for example, by the same fucking studios when trying to shift their movies). Damn near every human being on the planet owns a copy of Revolver, for example. There's no reason for this (overrated) album to run nearly 20 bucks, but it does. What can you get for $8.99? Rick Astley's Greatest Hits, or The Cure's Wild Mood Swings, the latter an album so dire that Robert Smith's embarrassment physically manifested itself in 125 pounds of extra tits and gut. 

If the major labels are going to survive they're going to have to stop acting like cunts to their customers. This includes:

a) Shitty limited editions of new releases in piss-poor packaging with a "bonus" DVD containing an electronic media kit (this is the equivalent of bundling an advert for the car with your new fucking car, and then charging 20% extra for the edition).

b) Charging outrageous prices for music that has turned a profit thousands of times over. EMI doesn't need to continue to clear $7 profit on every copy of Dark Side Of The Moon. It's the rock equivalent of Smokey And The Bandit - it ought to run a fiver.

c) Further hastening the demise of physical music by this "eco-packaging" trend that manages to position cheap, shitty packaging as an environmentally conscious bonus (this is happening in a particularly egregious fashion in the UK, with back catalog stuff suddenly getting repackaged in what appears to be fragments of used egg carton). They ought to be treating the 25 of us left still buying physical media nicely, not rubbing our faces in it. This lesson appears to have been learned with regard to the thriving vinyl market, where new and back catalog albums are lavishly packaged in gatefold sleeves on 180 gram vinyl. There's no reason to stuff a $19 CD in a package that even 1997-era AOL would reject as cheap shit. My copy of PJ Harvey's White Chalk came wrapped in poo-smeared newspaper.

d) Ill-conceived, poorly remastered, badly packaged Deluxe/Legacy/Collector Editions of albums that don't deserve it, with a bonus disc containing six remixes you've already got and a live bootleg that should have stayed bootleg, plus sleeve notes written by Paul Morley, recycled from an earlier piece written by Paul Morley.

e) Stop designing otherwise splendid $75 box sets where the discs themselves (you know, the things with the actual music on them) are tucked into scratchy little slits in the book or crap cardboard sleeves, thus ensuring the discs are all scratched to buggery before I've even broken the shrinkwrap.

f) Releasing records by Coldplay.