Last Tuesday, Apple’s iTunes, the ubiquitous online music store that sold more than 2.4 billion tracks last year alone, changed its own tune, announcing that songs would no longer be sold with copying restrictions and that they would be available at various prices.
The digerati crowed over the collapse of the hated digital rights management (which Apple never liked, either) and record companies kicked up their heels at the thought of leaving behind the tyranny of the 99-cent price point.
But lost in the hubbub was the fact that Steve Jobs and Apple had been able to charge for content in the first place. Remember that when iTunes began, the music industry was being decimated by file sharing.
By coming up with an easy user interface and obtaining the cooperation of a broad swath of music companies, Jobs helped pull the business off the brink. He has been accused of running roughshod over the music labels, which are a fraction of their former size. But they are still in business.
Those of us who are in the newspaper business could not be blamed for hoping that someone like him comes along and ruins our business as well, by pulling the same trick: convincing the millions of interested readers who get their news every day free on newspapers’ sites that it’s time to pay up.
For a long time, newspapers assumed that as their print advertising declined, it would be intersected by a surging line of online advertising revenue. But that revenue is no longer growing at many newspaper sites, so if the lines cross, it will be because the print revenue is saying hello on its way to the basement.
As a report by Craig Moffett of Bernstein Research stated last year, “The notion that the enormous cost of real news-gathering might be supported by the…