[Ti] [OT] Applemusic.com - is the price right?

[Trevor J. Hutley]

At 21:37 -0400 29-4-2003, b wrote:
>>>  What is everyone here
>>>  willing to pay per song?
>
>$22.95 per 16 gigabytes

Flipper - your later correction took that to 18 Gb.
If I assume 7 Mb per track, that is about ¢9 per track.
Interesting result!

  My feeling - before any announcement from Apple - was that somewhere 
between ¢10 and ¢25 would be the point which represented the 
tranformed delivered value: some combination of potential 
disadvantages of slightly less quality, no ownership, the need for 7 
Mb personal storage; coupled with the advantages of easy preview, 
ease of selection, convenient direct delivery, broad choice leading 
to convenience of shopping at one point of sale; whilst reflecting a 
transformed value chain: the lack of intermmediaries (pressing, 
printing, packing, materials, storage, distribution, shipping, 
transport, etc)  and assuming that all of that economic cost could be 
just stripped out of the value chain, and a very much lower cost 
product devliered to the consumer.   Whereas what I see is about the 
same cost at the consumer level (on the previous basis that I stated 
of $1/track on a CD) with me wondering who is taking all that extra 
added value?
Of course, Apple have promoted this concept as a leading-edge 
digitial technology breakthrough - which it is - don't get me wrong, 
this whole idea is innovative, creative, well masterminded, 
brilliantly implemented.  They have not tried to show how technology, 
and through that re-configuration of the value chain, can bring 
(could bring) economic value to the consumer.

If there had been a clear economic advantage (rather than a broad 
equivalence), one could almost make a financial case, for regular 
music buyers, that buying an Apple/OS X would actually save their 
money in their new digital lifestlye (to use Apple terminology).  At 
¢25/track, you would possibly break-even on the Powerbook ourchase 
price if you bought the equivalent of 200 music CDs during its 
lifetime (order-of-magnitude calculation).

Just some things to think about.

regards,  Trevor