Selling recorded music presents some interesting decisions, many of them related to pricing and distribution channels. Well, interesting enough for me to follow a trail of recent posts. The trail led me to LA, and to an LA Times blog.
Warner Music Group raised eyebrows last month when it yanked a promising downloadable single and album from new U.K. chanteuse Estelle off iTunes in a bid to … boost sales? The move certainly helped two obscure cover bands, which quickly filled the void on iTunes with their own versions of Estelle’s “American Boy.”
The trail started at Reddit or some such site, and got to LA via Penny Distribution and Coolfer. It includes arguments that the price of a single should be more than the standard track price.
I don’t think that the music industry is going to solve its problems by making music more difficult or expensive to obtain. To return to the opening example, artificial scarcity isn’t going to help in an era of abundant (if not always legal) content and bandwidth.