Apple Gets Movie Soundtrack Rights - No Physical CD Planned
from the limited-market,-ain't-it? dept
According to this short blurb, Apple has been granted the exclusive rights to the US soundtrack for the upcoming movie, "The League of Extraordinary Gentleman". Because it's Apple, they're only going to offer the soundtrack as a full album download from iTunes for $10. No physical CDs will be produced. Of course, this clearly limits the market to those who happen to have Macs. However, it also cuts down (drastically) on production costs, and ups the margins significantly on the few sales it will get. Of course, in limiting the release to such a small audience, it almost guarantees that there will be a brisk trade in the soundtrack on the various file sharing systems. All in all, while it's nice to see a decision to release something online, this has to be seen as a backwards step, since they're releasing it only on a proprietary system that the majority of people don't have access to.
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File sharing
Curious - how will this work? The iTunes Music Store uses FairPlay copy protection. Any copies found on file sharing networks would be of very poor quality - not the 128kbps AAC format provided by iTMS.
Additionally, a Windows version of iTunes should be available in a few months - perhaps in enough time for the soundtrack to sell well on Windows systems as well. The reality is - how much would it sell on CD anyway? Probably not much at all.
Mike
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Re: File sharing
I'd also guess that there will be some promotional CDs or some other method that will get the songs in another digital format and will get them online before very long.
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Re: File sharing
but that won't stop ten or a thousand people from ripping it into friendly
192-kB MP3 files and shovelling it into Kazaa (or whatever Mac users
are left with these days). If it can be listened to, it will be encoded in MP3
and, hopefully, OGG.
The real news here is that the record label has finally found a way to cut
out the middlemen of brick and mortar. No more material costs, no meat-
space overhead whatsoever - it's a record exec's dream come true. That's
the real reason this thing has been embraced at all, and it's the reason
they don't care that (initially) only Mac users will buy it.
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RIAA sharpening knife
The RIAA's argument will be:
1. See, we did what they said they wanted (Net delivered music), yet they pirated it anyway.
2. The iTunes sells were poor, due to pirating.
All the lemmings will lap this up.
Never mind the facts, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
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No More CD's
I'm happy to see a major studio "online" - in every sense of the word.
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heh
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