These news are getting more visible each day…

this article / discussion at the Slashdot is interesting reading.

Music Industry Threatens to Pull Plug on Apple

Or like oil companies asking automobile manufacturers to share their profits.
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According to Apple, the original goal of the iTunes Music Store (ITMS) was to sell more iPods. In fact, they didn’t expect it to be profitable at all – but now it commands a sizable share of Apple’s quarterly revenue.
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Having observed their behavior in the past, I fully believe that the music industry really believes that they are doing Apple a favor and that they can cut Apple off.
If they close iTunes, iPod users will just rip their own music (and share it) leaving 0 revenue.
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It’s probably just a bluff, but if the Music Industry does go through with this it would be incredibly stupid of them. I know it would be contrary to their agreements with Apple Records, but if the music execs do go ahead with this, I think Apple should start selling music directly from the musicians rather than going through the labels. They could simultaneously reduce the prices and give the musicians much more than they get under their current contracts.
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Ford and GM announced today that unless Exxon and Shell start sharing gasoline revenues, future SUVs will run on ethanol.
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The recording industry never saw a cash cow they didn’t want to kill.

iTunes is a very interesting solution for distributing music in a digital and network world.

the dream is if we could bypass this greedy companies altogether… at list Apple proposes something that we could even in some sense describe as fair trade.

i hope people see who is right and who is wrong in all this story.

the other day i read that a band edited by Sony, had to publish in their site an help text explaining how to do if you wanted to rip theirs audio cd for the computer… it was fun to read about that!

🙂