Music industry backs down over Itunes closure threat
APPLE’S THREAT to close down Itunes seems to have done the trick in getting the Copyright Royalty Board to keep the price of royalties paid to record companies for downloaded music at 9 cents a song.
The Cupertino company threatened to close down the incredibly successful music marketplace if the decision went through to up the price of downloading songs from nine cents to 15, a 66 per cent price hike.
So, The National Music Publishers Association, which has been pushing for the rise in royalties for 18 months seems to have backed down, no doubt realising that, without the huge amounts of wonga put its way by Apple fans would leave it rather impoverished.
An Apple representative said, "We're pleased with the CRB's decision."
The CRB achieved a hollow victory by getting a proposed cut in the rate to 4.8 cents proposed by some vendors, coming to an agreement of 9.1 cents a song for at least five years. We can't help but wonder how much cash went into the lawyers pockets over this whole shambles.
This decision has been pronounced by the NMPA as “a positive development for all songwriters and music publishers" and is the first time royalty rates have been mechanically decided for digital music.
Jonathan Potter of the Digital Music Association, which represents online music stores like Apple said, "Keeping rates where they are will help digital services and retailers continue to innovate and grow for the next several years. "
This move doesn’t come as much of a surprise, as Apple was highly unlikely to close the store – over the last five years it has sold more than five billion songs online, and that's a whole load of nine cents.
Digital sales figures show that songs and album sales rose by almost 50 percent last year according to the Recording Industry Association of America. Meanwhile CD sales dropped 20 per cent to $7.4bn (£4bn).
Looks like our predictions were correct. Then again, the chances of Apple killing its cash cow were always pretty slim. µ
L'Inq
Beeb
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So what's the position of the UK market in this matter.

I doubt UK music publishers take from Apple 9 cents.



So the songwriters stay at 9 cents instead of 15.
Um, could someone please explain to me just how getting less per song is a "positive development" ?
Can I use that argument to pay 60% of my next purchase ?
Or 60% of my income tax ?
After all, if it's a "positive development", then we should do it more often !
I think the industry could adopt a more flexible pricing to reward popular singers. Such as, for 1-100k copies, artists get 2 cent per song. For 100k-1m, 10 cents per song. For 1m+ 20 cents. Something like that.