David Kronke: The great iTunes swindle?

Open rebellion erupted last month when Ricky Gervais’s podcast began charging $1.95 on iTunes for a service that had been, for the first dozen episodes, free (the series initially originated from England's newspaper The Guardian, which has no ties to the for-pay podcasts). Hundreds of “reviews�? vehemently excoriated Gervais for charging the same price for a 30-minute audio file that could be spend to download an episode of their favorite TV shows. A few timorous souls pointed out that there’s no outrage at spending 99 cents to download a three- or four-minute pop song, but the overriding conventional wisdom seemed to be that Gervais had crossed some line between good will and greed.

(An aside about Gervais’s show: I have a number of recordings of his London radio show that presaged the podcasts, in which he was quickly divining the comic gold that could be mined from his sidekick Karl Pilkington – who, essentially, is his Larry “Bud�? Melman, a clueless, lumpen clod whose peculiar worldview endlessly amuses Gervais and bemuses Stephen Merchant, Gervais’s writing/directing partner on “The Office�? and “Extras.�? Initially, Pilkington – the show’s producer, there mainly to push buttons to lead into songs and commercial breaks – was quiet, reticent, vocally resisting being dragged into Gervais's anarchic lunacy. But as the radio show continued, they couldn’t get Karl to shut up – he’d actually interrupt Gervais and Merchant to inject some of his own vacuity, and they were perfectly happy with this. Some of his stories were epic jaw-droppers, such as an anecdote about a blind date with a woman who had a bone marrow disease that he dumped, because he didn’t want to spend good money on her just to have her die on him.)

Anyway, iTunes seems to have backed off from the controversy a bit – it offers a free, two-and-a-half-minute video podcast offering an exchange between Gervais and Pilkington, but I couldn’t find the pay-for podcasts there; for those, you’ll have to go to audible.com, which is offering six episodes for $6.95, which seems reasonable.

But there still seems to be discrepancies in the prices for video downloads. The most egregious example is “High School Musical,�? a dopey if cute Disney Channel movie that still scores high ratings whenever the cable network runs it, two months after its premiere (the highlight, a musical number boasting clever choreography from the high school in question’s basketball team, comes early in the film, it’s all predictably downhill from there). That’s going for a whopping $9.99 on iTunes, for a low-budget 90-minute movie; you could download five high-end episodes of “Lost�? or “Desperate Housewives�? for that. (On the other hand, you would pay about $8 for four sitcom episodes that would roughly comprise "High School Musical's" running time.) That same $9.99 will get you a full month of original episodes of “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.�?

But “High School Musical�? is aimed at tweens, those most likely adept at iPod technology, and when it comes to entrenched kids who won’t take no for an answer and parents who don’t want yet another argument with their kids, you know who’s going to win that battle: Disney. Same tweens probably already have the soundtrack, and they’ll want the DVD with the “extras�? Disney’ll scratch together to make it a desirable addition to the collection. So parents may end up spending $45 for a movie that the Disney Channel has aired 20 or more times at this point.

What do you think? Is there an unfair, exploitative disparity in pricing schedules at iTunes, or will the market justify everything, and when costs get unreasonable customers will simply tune out?