Sunday, October 18, 2009

What's the deal with iTunes pricing?

Since I'm still tooling around with my iPod Touch, I've been delving deeper into iTunes. Despite subscribing to dozens of podcasts through iTunes, I've only spent money on it once, but I poked around in their video section to see if I could find anything cool.

I was pleased to see that they've a healthy supply of TV shows available, even if I thought that $1.99 for one episode of a (fantastic) TV show was more than I was willing to pay. Taking that into consideration, I couldn't believe what record labels were getting away with when it came to music videos:


3 minutes and 39 seconds of music video costs the very same as 30 minutes of quality TV entertainment! I can only assume that these prices are so high so as not to cannibalise the music prices (which are between $0.99 and $1.99), and not because the market sustains the selling of promotional music videos that are readily available for free streaming online.

The bands are making music videos anyhow - it only makes sense that they should be able to sell it for $2 a pop to the impressionable young fans whose shallow gamut of opinion consists of "that's naff" or "DIS IS THE BEST THING EVA!!!!!!"

Fools and their money are often accompanied with obnoxious punctuation.

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