The Daily Swarm

P2P.Net:

It’s all the fault of Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music, says GigaOm.The Big 4 talked poor old Apple into it, says the story.

Codenamed Cocktail and “introduced at a ‘rock and roll event’ in San Francisco” it “promised to give consumers a new reason to buy albums instead of individual songs”

“Offering expanded cover art, lyrics, videos, animation and other digital goodies, iTunes LP was intended to evoke the feeling of spinning an LP record and holding the jacket in your hands. Especially when paired with a tablet computer (then rumored, now real) that would provide a new way to view large-format art, consumers were promised a digital experience that mimicked a physical one.”

It’s somewhat ironic that the very company that atomized the album in order to sell individual tracks – one of many causes for the music industry’s decade-long tailspin – has encouraged the rebundling of songs with iTunes LP. But I’m told by an industry source who preferred to remain anonymous that iTunes LP wasn’t Apple’s idea in the first place. Rather, it’s the result of the same renegotiations between Apple and the major record labels that yielded DRM-free songs and flexible pricing early last year, a concession by Cupertino to make a gesture in favor of album sales as consumers increasingly show a preference for digital singles.

“Neither Apple nor anyone else I spoke with was able to break out sales figures, but sources in various parts of the music industry agreed that the financial impact of iTunes LP on record sales has been tiny, if it’s had any effect at all”, the story adds.