AC/DC Blows Off iTunes, Takes Highway To Digital Music Hell
Aug 1st, 2007 | By James Lewin | Category: Digital Music, Strange 
Rock group AC/DC, one of the last remaining big-name holdouts to digital distribution, has announced an exclusive¬†deal with Verizon Wireless’ V CAST Music’s digital music service to deliver their entire music catalog digitally.AC/DC must have negotiated a sweet deal with Verizon, because their deal looks like it could be a highway to digital music hell:
- They blew off iTunes, the most successful digital music service in the world;
- They’re only offering most of their music as albums, not as singles; and
- Their albums are priced higher, at $12, than people are used to paying for digital downloads.
How do you spell dumb?
AC/DC.
Murphy
Don’t you think that they must have been guaranteed a chunk of money if they cut the deal?
Good luck to the boys… but I seriously doubt many will be more than the going rate at iTunes.
Hopefully this “test” will fail. The music industry is trying to change the digital download industry so they can get control again and charge more.
I am looking forward to the demise of the big music companies. I want to see the artists get a larger % of the sales. Yes the big groups have tons of $$$, but there are many smaller artists that sign with the big companies and get almost nothing.
The US$0.99 per track model would work very well in the long-term if the artists got a larger % and the big companies weren’t around anymore.
Ouch! Too bad. I’m a long time AC/DC fan – always have been. But I’m also practical. In my mid-30’s now, I once had a sizable CD collection. But when I’d finished the arduous task of importing all my CD’s into iTunes (so that I could cary my all my music with me on my iPod of course), the only place I buy music now is iTunes. I absolutely love it!
But it’s cool – i’m sure there’s a good reason why the boys went with Verizon ($$$) – I’ll just buy the album the old fashioned way and then import it into iTunes. Hey – look on the bright side – i’ll still physically have all their albums… I’m just glad they’ve finally gotten busy and begun working on the next album! It’s about damn time…
“Biggest Fan” said:
“I’ll just buy the album the old fashioned way and then import it into iTunes.”
No, you won’t.
AC/DC deployed an advanced level of Macrovision protection in their remastered CDs. Not only will iTunes not import them at all, but all PC-based cd/dvd drives only recognize the disc as “Recordable CD” – and even trying to RECORD onto them fails as well. Fucking BRILLIANT on the part of AC/DC to alienate an assload of fans who only want to use iTunes to manage their music libraries. Of course, now I get to hate their guts over this, even while I refuse to pay $1.29 or whateverthefuck they want over at their website for an MP3 I am perfectly capable of making on my own. I’ll just go on Ebay and find someone who has AC/DCs complete catalog on a couple of DVDs for $30. and buy that. There’s ALWAYS an end run around copy protection! THAT is why DRM is just plain stupid.