UK Indie Labels Claim Apple's Offer Equals Commercial Suicide
from the doesn't-sound-that-appealing dept
While Apple continues to expand their iTunes offering to Europe, many of the larger independent labels in the UK and France have decided not to participate, calling the offer Apple made them "commercial suicide." They claim that Apple is trying to bully them, using its position as the dominant downloadable music retailer to force the smaller labels into accepting a deal that gives them much less than their major label colleagues. Of course, they don't detail exactly what was offered, so it's tough to tell which side (and it certainly could be both) is really being greedy here.
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CD Baby Disagrees
### EMAIL BEGINS
Date: Mon, 14 Jun 2004 15:16:08 -0700
From: Derek at CD Baby
To: pho@onehouse.com
Subject: Re: pho: iTunes to go live w/out indie repetoire?
I'll stick my neck out on this:
From everything I've understood in the last 2 weeks with Apple, the
entire CD Baby Digital Distribution catalog (about 230,000 songs)
will be part of the European iTunes launch this week.
The price offered was pretty much the same as the U.S. rates, and
we had no problem with it (or them) at all.
The international addendum was only a two paragraphs and didn't
take but a day to negotiate.
I'm not really sure what sources this story, below, is coming from.
But it's the opposite of my experience. And we're about as "leading"
and "indie" as it gets.
:-)
--
Derek Sivers, CD Baby
http://www.cdbaby.com
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