End Noise

There has been some hubbub raised about the price ($9.99) of the first full length movie released on the iTunes music store. The reason why it is so expensive in my opinion is not because the Disney is greedy (though they are, like any good corporation, a fan of profits) or that Apple is adding their usual Apple markup. It is because movie studios are desperately scared of movies becoming 'cheap' in the eyes of the consumer. They are at a similar cross road as the music industry was in 1998. Ask a teen how much music should be and most will say free. Music has lost most of its perceived value to their target audience. I don't think this happened exclusively because of Napster 1.0 (though that didn't help), it happened because it became ubiquitous. Every computer all of a sudden had more music on it then an average music fan could consume in their life. An ipod could hold more music than even the John Cusack's 'High Fidelity' (or Nick Hornby's for the readers out there) character could listen to.

This mass proliferation of music made it a commodity. It lost its specialness and then its value.

Despite the fact in the digital world, there are few distribution costs. The movie industry isn't lowering the price of the movies. They are keeping it high to sacrifice some sales in order to avoid the association of ubiquity with movies.