Yes… Apple may shut down the iTunes Music Store. The Copyright Royalty Board in Washington, D.C. is expected to rule this Thursday on a request by the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) to exponentially increase royalty rates paid to its members on songs bought from online music stores like iTunes. This sucks because they will raise the rates from 9 cents up to 15 cents per track. This may not seem like a big deal but for iTunes, that’s a raise of 66%! Apple pays an estimated 70 cents of every dollar it collects per song to the record companies responsible for each track. The record companies turn over nine cents to the music publishers who control the copyrights to these songs. This doesn’t leave too much money for iTunes and they are not too happy.
Apple Inc. is highly against this act and shows its clear displeasure:
Eddy Cue; Vice President of iTunes said, “Apple has repeatedly made it clear that it is in this business to make money, and most likely would not continue to operate [the iTunes music store] if it were no longer possible to do so profitably.” AHHHHH!
The iTunes Music Store has been the Internets most successful music store for over five years. Piper Jaffray estimates that Apple will sell approximately 2.4 billion songs this year which gives Apple about 85% share of the digital music market. That’s a lot.
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