Information Week – June 2, 2007:
Apple’s dominance of the online music market has prompted the world’s largest record music company to fight for a greater share of the profits.
Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group told Apple last week that it that it would not be renewing its annual contract to sell digital songs through Apple’s iTunes Music Store, according to reports published in the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
Instead, Universal plans to sell music at will, meaning that it could withdraw its songs from Apple’s online store on short notice. The move is widely seen as an effort to obtain better contractual terms from Apple.
Universal’s move is a risky one, however. Estimates published in the New York Times indicate that 15% of Universal’s revenue for online music sales during the first quarter of the year came from Apple and other online stores. And Apple CEO Steve Jobs is not known for allowing Apple’s partners to dictate how his company does business.
#31
You should know by now that I am a full blown music outlaw;)
Universal will pay when the legions of loyal ipod fans revolt. It won’t be pretty if Universal pulls this kind of stuff. They had better pony-up or else they will see significant losses. Apple will stand it’s ground, offering more and more DRM free music and if Uni-vendi decides not to play ball they are losing out on some big business. Hard ball like that will not succeed. I say let them leave I’ve already got enough U2 and eminem loaded on my ipod. Bye-Bye Uni-Vendi maybe Apple will buy their sorry bottoms.
#33
Ive been reading around and… I don’t really accept the premise that iTunes users will revolt based on an exclusive movie or song here or there ends up on another device/service.
From a pure greed POV universal can rent a movie on the XBOX 360 for 6 bucks or they can sell it on iTunes for 10 bucks. I think they would prefer to rent it. IMO. In that environment they kinda have to be exclusive or else people will buy the movie then share it around.
Also… There was no fan revolt when GTA4 dumped exclusives on the ps3 to also release (with extra content none the less) on the xbox. I mean there was some grumbling but… And the game system fanboys make us Mac vs PC fanboys look mild and idyllic.
I think this is about movies, not songs, so Universals song catalog wont leave iTunes, and apple really can’t threaten to stop selling a major portion of the catalog. I just think Universal wants to rent movies online for a time, then move to rental and they prefer other peoples DRM schemes (for rental) to the DRM provided by apple.
Anything that causes Steve Jobs problems is good – besides iTunes causes global warming.
I’m kind of amused by the assumption some folks make that the only iTunes sales are people who buy iPods.
I’ve bought nearly a thousand songs from the iTunes store (setting aside all the TV shows I follow via iTunes season passes) but I have no iPod or any other portable player. Just my desktop and laptop.
And all of my music is legitimate. I own about 1000 CD (all copied to my desktop and stored away) and belong to eMusic.
I can’t imagine that Apple makes much money off of iTunes. Someone earlier said that they make 30 cents per song and I find that hard to believe. Plus if you subtract bandwidth and itunes development it is not alot of money.
If you take 1 billion songs at 30 cents and apply some Flintstone math it only adds up to 300 million. They could probably make more money from Google offering a web browser to windows users 🙂
I have about 5 gigs of music and have only purchased one song from iTunes for my son’s hockey team (the hockey song by Stomping Tom Conners) . I prefer to encode my music from cds; however I have downloaded albums that I purchased as cassettes years ago. I don’t think that I should be forced to repurchase my music.
Now if Apple would sell TV shows in Canada I would buy a number of season passes and cancel my satelite subscription. Sadly they don’t so I have to download the shows I miss via newsgroups or torrents.
-Spooof
You guys jumped the gun; apparently Universal has been brought back into the fold.
😀
Damn, Woz is FAT!
Gawd, GregA. How do you live with whatever your condition is defined as?
Claims like this:
•AT& T is failing,
•Most music on iPods is stolen
*The iPhone is defective
Make you appear to be either out of touch with reality or a pathological liar.
Podesta,
If you haven’t been following other stories I really want an iPhone. No really I do. I have some reservations about it, but OMG I want one. Maybe in December a refresh will produce a phone I am willing to plop 600 bucks down for and a 2 year commitment, but not edge. I don’t think apple is gonna lower the price of the iPhone anytime soon, so I have to wait until they make the phone I want. 3g and some software updates and Im there. I do an obscene amount of MMS so complaints about the current i-phones email system are a deal killer for me(for now, I fully expect apple will fix this, i bet there is haggling going on to determine if there will be a per use fee for IM and MMS messages so the software never shipped).
I don’t know anyone (irl) with a music player that has legit music on it. I am sure there are some people who buy music but, everyone I know swaps around the hard drives loaded with 20-50k songs and they copy and add. I know just about every current song on my LG phone is pirated but for the prince album, and a few songs found on emusic.
The first couple of days there were reports that the AT&T network is having trouble. It was because something like a million people were all hitting their network at the same time. There are currently a lot of youtube videos showing the the edge network + iPhone operating at dial up like speeds. I bet like every other isp in America ATT is oversubscribed on their Internet service, lets see how they adapt to an actual Internet device on their network before we give ATT a passing score on this one. It certainly looks like apple is going to be selling several hundred thousand iPhones a week for the foreseeable future and that is going to tax even ATT’s mighty data network.
With me always expect some severe amount of sarcasm to the point it is weird, or even hostile sounding. I am just goofing off. Dvorak wrote a column about me (I think) in particular a couple of weeks ago, you should go read it.
Also I sometime deliberatly troll Lauren the Ghoti because I enjoy reading his replies. And to be fair, I think he likes giving them, so no foul there. You should read our exchange when we were debating who was more successful and wealthy. He called me a god, er i mean dog.
Exactly so. Despite appearances, I really don’t harbor any genuine emnity for anyone here. Just call me an enthusiastic amateur connoisseur of drolly vitriolic diatribe/dialogue.
Of course I make an exception for you, Pod-person. You’d’ve been much happier in old-school Soviet Russia. I’ll put in a good word for you with Putin next time I see him. The way things are going over there, your ideological “purity” and propaganda skillz will be in demand soon. And you’ll get a kewl uniform!
Oh, and BTW…
Uni blinked first.
Told you so. 🙂