Would You Pay A Premium For Fresh-From-The-Oven Music?

noah | February 14, 2008 1:00 am
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Radiohead made headlines, and made music geeks around the world fall in love with them all over again, when they gave fans (crappy-bitrate versions of) In Rainbows 10 days after they’d claimed to have finished the record. Has the music business learned from Thom Yorke and Co.’s lesson in piping-hot music delivery? Well, sort of.

At this year’s Mobile World Congress, Rob Wells, Universal Music Group’s senior vice president of digital, talked about the idea of giving listeners the chance to hear albums as soon as they were completed, and his idea ran as such:

“If an artist has just delivered an album from studio, we could potentially deliver it to a limited number of users for a higher price. It’s something we’re quite keen to develop; for example, through our own B2C channels–artists’ Web sites.”

While I’m well aware that there are economic arguments for promoting scarcity, but something about this idea just seems off to me; not only is the idea of charging customers more money for music an idea that should only be thought of after said customers become reacclimated to paying for music again at all, the potential for piracy is even heightened, given that this model pretty much expands the “press advance” model to people who pay a premium for access. I’m not saying that the music should be given away for free, but it seems to me that this is only expanding the group of people who will have access to early-release music ever so slightly–and using “willingness to pay” as the sole criterion for whether or not people get access to that club will only serve to turn potential customers off even more.

@ MWC: Universal Music Group In Unlimited Access For Long Term; Plans ‘Temporal Pricing’ [mocoNews.net via Coolfer]