Costly Music Store Coming to Cellphones

Found on Slashdot on Saturday, 19 November 2005
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The new Sprint Music Store is the first legal music downloading service you can access right from a cellphone, and Wall Street Journal tech columnist Walt Mossberg gives high marks to the interface, download speed and playback quality. But he criticizes the 'stratospheric new price for the legal download of a single song: $2.50.' Sprint justifies the price because of the convenience and usability of its store. Mossberg responds, 'I believe something else is at work here: a lethal combination of two industries many consumers believe typically charge too much. One is the bumbling record industry, which has been seeking to raise prices in the fledgling legal downloading market even as it continues to bleed from free, illegal downloading. The other is the cellphone carriers, or, as I like to call them, "the Soviet ministries," which too often treat their customers as captive and refuse to allow open competition for services they offer over their networks.'

Ok, so you can buy an album for an average of $15.00 in most shops. Let's just assume such an album has 15 tracks. At "Sprint Music Store", you'd pay a whopping $37.50 for the download. That's exactly 250% compared to the normal price; plus, you don't get a cover, case, booklet or anything. I can already see success coming...