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Gouge Alert |
Talk about artificial scarcity. Talk about self-defeating control strategies. Talk about inserting friction into the marketplace. The nascent ringtone business is suffering from inflation, and it's barely a legitimate business in the first place. This Reuters article notes that while whole-song music downloads cost about a dollar in the U.S., ringtones (which can be as short as a few seconds) often cost four times as much. Extortionary royalties are imposed on resellers (mobile phone vendors, for example) by record labels, keeping prices sky-high.
"They carry a price tag of as much as four times higher than the typical Internet download price in Western Europe — a price gap that could prematurely stifle a promising ringtone business, Informa said."
Huh… I thought Ted Cohen said it was the DIY program Xingtones which was stifling the ringtone business. Ted?
