Just read another article railing Apple for charging $10,000 for the iTunes LP treatment on any album. As usual, it was highly critical of Apple, suggesting that the high price basically blocks out all indie labels from the new format, etc.
I work in the Graphic Design business. Trust me. $10,000 is not that expensive. Not for Apple’s design expertise. If you don’t have $10,000 to spend on such a major new marketing gimmick, you’re not that serious about your product. It’s not just the design itself; we’re also talking about getting into an exclusive club before it catches on.
Two things to consider here. First, there are around a dozen or so albums currently offered as iTunes LPs. That’s a tiny, tiny selection compared to the overall iTunes music catalog. In other words, if you want the highest possible exposure for your new album right now, this is the easiest $10,000 decision you’ve ever made. It targets a specific demographic of iTunes users that is willing to pay a bit extra for more features. I’m sure there are hundreds of iTunes addicts who have bought all the LPs so far, even if they don’t like some of the artists. In a year, when there are 2000 iTunes LPs to choose from, yours won’t stand out nearly as much. That alone is worth the money.
Second, Apple doesn’t want to be a full-time graphic design house. They don’t even hire enough App Store program checkers to keep up with demand. What makes you think they want to employ 10,000 graphic artists, house them in a building with Power Macs and the Adobe Creative Suite, and spend the next two years making a couple of million iTunes LPs? If they charged what most of these critics considered a reasonable, “indie accessible” price for an iTunes LP design, that’s exactly what would happen. Apple creates the tools for other people to be creative. With few exceptions, they don’t compete with the creative community directly by getting into content creation.
Keeping in mind those two things, then, it should be obvious to anyone with a brain that Apple is setting the price high enough right now to keep the workload reasonable enough to be handled by a few designers part time for a short while, in order to give the format time to figure out where it’s going demographically. It’s no secret that the format is simple HTML, CSS, and Javascript. It was designed to go open source for a reason. But like most things with Apple, they’re taking their time and trying to get it right themselves, rather than releasing things into the wild blindly just to see what happens. Just as with iPhone apps, Apple is setting the bar high with several of its own examples before releasing the goods to the community at large. Personally, I think it’s a great strategy. Think about it. If there were only 50 or so iTunes LPs to choose from, and 40 of them were designed by cut-rate graphic designers in Russia, what are the chances the format would catch on with the iTunes community at large? I have no doubt that in two years, iTunes LP will be the norm for most new albums, and indie bands will be able to design their own, while record labels, instead of Apple, will charge their bands the $20,000 or more for the design work as a way to keep up with their CEO yacht payments.
