Even though many listeners think that the current average price for a downloaded music track is a tad on the high side, the five major labels have got together to discuss putting the price up – by quite a bit, too.
At US$0.99 (€0.83), music is doing OK, if not exactly flying off the servers – yet a hike to US$1.25 or even US$2.99 per song is being talked about. Online music stores are expensive to run, say the industry, and most of them lose money. Apple does very well out of iTunes, and sells a lot of iPods because of it, but the labels don’t see much out of it.
The legal download business is only just starting to flourish – a price rise on this scale will surely kill it off completely.