The LA Times ran a story today about web only digital song releases for 10 cents a shot. This doesn’t sound like the worst idea ever until they throw the rest of the carrot away in exchange for the less clean end of the stick:
They hope customers will also buy, for an extra 79 or 89 cents, a version of the song they can download and transfer to portable devices or burn to CDs.
What I fail to understand is why services don’t offer the ‘only playable through a web browser content’ as a promotion tool instead of nickel and diming potential customers with the not so compelling offer to hear some ultra compressed music through shitty computer speakers. What reason do you have to pay twice if you like something enough to listen to it on a medium that isn’t streaming and is apt to give out ‘buffering…’ messages instead of trickling out the dime worth of promotional material you just surrendered a micropayment for?
This seems little more than an attempt to charge the potential listener for some half assed marketing towards them. I will say that this is slightly smarter than charging bands to churn out massive numbers of promo product to the employees of chain record stores but only slightly. I would guess that most companies have some sort of marketing and promotional budget built into their business plan and this smells of an attempt to scrape some revenue out of what might otherwise be a demographic interested in hearing a full version of a song before plunking down the full price of an album or use-specific rights for that song.
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