iTunes "steals music's soul"
updated 10:45 am EST, Thu February 16, 2006
iTunes hurts musicians
At least one indie label is refusing to allow iTunes to license any of the indie label's music, according to a report. Victory Records' founder Tony Brummel says that iTunes "makes music disposable. It makes it a faceless impulse item. It steals its soul," according to Macworld UK. Brummel asks why consumers should be allowed to "cherry pick" specific songs, thus "cannibalizing full length album sales," with an apparent impact on artist incomes, according to the report. In regards to Apple's influence in the music industry, Brummel points out that if the major labels wanted to force Apple away from the set-pricing model, they would all pull out their music from iTunes. "Focus on the 96 percent which is traditional retail. Traditional retail supports music 1,000 times more than iTunes does."
Dedicated MacNNer
Joined: Sep 2001
Give me a break.....
You'd think an indy label would recognize most of all how useful something like iTMS (or any electronic distribution) can be. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that if I walk down to my local record chain (say, an FYE or a Sam Goody or a Tower Records), I probably couldn't find a lot of smaller indy CD's. But an electronic store like iTMS doesn't need to worry about which CD's to stock, etc. And if I hear something about some indy band, I'm very likely to check out iTMS and see if their stuff is for sale, but I'm not going to drive out to the store and then hunt around in the hopes that they have a copy of their CD left. And regarding cannibalizing album sales; last I checked, there are a number of albums on iTunes where you can only buy the full album, not individual songs. If that's really the big deal, he could put his label's albums up for sale and make them album-only sales.