For the prettiest one

[andrewducker]

Whilst I am terribly happy for Mr Jobs and the remaining members of The Beatles on their managing to successfully sign a contract, would someone care to explain to me why iTunes is selling the albums for more than Amazon?

(Sergeant Pepper's - £7.99 on Amazon, £10.99 on iTunes).

I know Apple users are terribly loyal, but is it really worth 25% of the cost not to have to deal with those old-fashioned plastic discs?

(I speak as someone who hasn't bought music in hard copy for about five years, and gets 99% of his music through Spotify nowadays, which I'm perfectly happy to pay £10/month to get ad-free and on my mobile phone.)

Comments

[skington.livejournal.com]

You get a bonus "making of" documentary for each album, though. It's not quite the same thing.

As for Spotify, the player, at least on Mac OS, tends to intermittently decide that it can't connect to the Internet (when everything else is fine), or announce that music I added to a playlist months ago is now no longer available. I much prefer, on those occasions when I decide I want new music, to buy a physical CD and rip it in lossless format, rather than rely on some third party to stream me music in a lossy format.

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

The 'bonus' videos are on the remastered 'CD's (not actually conforming to the CD audio specs, hence the quotes) as well - at least the stereo versions (not the mono ones).
And while Spotify is lossy, if you're on a premium subscription it's 320kps ogg vorbis, which sounds pretty decent to me through computer speakers. And you can cache the music locally so don't need to connect to the net.

As for the original question, I think it's because the CDs are sold through many different suppliers so competition is in effect. The Beatles' CDs are meant to be always sold at new-release price, so they will be sold to Amazon or HMV on the assumption that they will be selling them for about thirteen quid - presumably Amazon eat the difference. Apple, by contrast, have a monopoly on digital versions of the Beatles' music, but they will also have entered into a contract with EMI/Apple Corps saying that they will treat them as new releases.

None of this will matter in a few years, though, as the Beatles' recordings (though not songs) start going out of copyright as of the end of 2012.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

If people wanted "making of" features for albums or films in any real way (as opposed to an "oh I want to justify this purchase...aha, features I don't really care about are justification enough!") then they'd sell them separately too, because they can apparently justify a £3 or £4 pricetag going by rereleased albums and films that now having making of features, photo galleries and suchlike.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

Wait, I paid to buy remastered versions of albums that I already owned, twice. Some of the songs on those albums, I've now bought five times. I don't think I can take part in this discussion due to being a colossal hypocrite if I am sarcastic about people paying over the odds for ~BEATLES DOWNLOADS OMG~

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

wait, six times actually. Oh god.

[andrewducker]

Sorry it doesn't work well for you. Spotify works seamlessly on my two PCs and my phone.