Record Labels Might Want Your First Born Too

The war is going public. For the past few years the iTMS has been the far and away winner of the authorized digital music stores. There are several reasons for this, not least of which is runaway iPod sales. But Apple CEO Steve Jobs has consistently said his store's success is also based on generous use rights and the simple dollar-a-track price point. Now that the iTMS has established itself as a legitimate music purchasing outlet, a few labels are a little disgruntled. In the midst of renegotiating with the record companies, Jobs last week made the rift more public, stating that the music industry is getting greedy if they want to raise prices.

This didn't sit well with Warner Music Group CEO Edgar Bronfman who last Thursday shot back at Jobs, stating that no content industry has uniform pricing. As if he's a bastion of artist representation, he stated that such pricing schemes are unfair to artists and consumers. The dishonesty of his position is pretty clear: even if back catalog songs floated to less than a dollar, hiking prices on popular songs would really be a boon to the copyright holder (the record labels) but only would minimally impact the creator (the artist). Consumers, obviously, would also be left with higher prices on the songs they want most.

Even more incredible was Bronfman's statement about revenue streams. While the music industry has a right to seek more ways to monetize their intellectual property, do they genuinely believe they deserve a piece of the hardware market? Bronfman, dizzy from his sense of entitlement, says:

We are selling our songs through iPod, but we don't have a share of iPod's revenue. We want to share in those revenue streams. We have to get out of the mindset that our content has promotional value only. We have to keep thinking how we are going to monetize our product for our shareholders. We are the arms supplier in the device wars between Samsung, Sony, Apple, and others.

With that kind of logic, the music industry could ask for kickbacks from Ford or Bose or any other company that includes a product to reproduce music. And if the music industry is entitled, why not software companies? In that case Microsoft certainly deserves a kickback from any company that builds an application on top of Windows.

I'm sorry Mr. Bronfman, but music is not a highway. You can't just erect toll plazas because your product is used in ways that don't directly benefit your bottom line. Instead of trying to nickel and dime every last piece of potential revenue, you should focus on your business: publishing music.