Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Apple revealed in January that the days of 'any song you like for 99c' at the iTunes Store were numbered. It seems the change will - as indicated at the time - be implemented in April.
At Macworld Expo last January, Apple CEO Steve Jobs revealed that the price of individual tracks sold by the iTunes Store would no longer be fixed at $US0.99.
Apple had finally given in to the music labels' demands for variable pricing, presumably in order to make DRM-free tracks the norm.
From April, Jobs said, songs would be priced at $US0.69, $US0.99 or $US1.29. Most albums would remain at $US9.99.
According to a Los Angeles Times report, the new pricing regime will come into effect on April 7.
It seems that the labels are hoping that a 30 percent price increase won't hurt sales by a corresponding amount, despite the straightened economic circumstances.
Possible scenarios include offering a discounted second track with the purchase of a premium-price song (remember when the 'B side' came for free?).
It's also possible that increasing the price of individual songs from popular artists will make an album seem like a better buy. Some parts of the music industry have long complained that allowing consumers to pick the eyes out of albums with individual downloads hurts artistic integrity as well as revenue.
Over at Amazon, where variable-pricing and no DRM has held sway for some time, the most popular tracks are discounted to $US0.79. Others sell at $US0.89 or $US0.99.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.
LATEST HEADLINES FROM YOUR IT
