Apple vs. Warner Music Group?

An article up today about the little spat occurring between Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Warner Music Group (WMG henceforth) CEO Edgar Bronfman. Apparently WMG is pushing for music downloads to be placed on a sliding price scale, which Jobs, perhaps rightly, characterizes as "greedy". There are a lot of issues at play here, but I want to focus on the money quote, reproduced here for your pleasure:

“To have only one price point is not fair to our artists, and I dare say not appropriate to consumers. The market should decide, not a single retailer,” said Mr. Bronfman. “Some songs should be $0.99 and some songs should be more. I don’t want to give anyone the impression that $0.99 is a thing of the past.”

Ah, the market. That glorious vehicle for delivery of goods and services. The problem is, the market has already decided how much people will pay for downloaded music. Napster, anyone? Innovation is still a part of the market even if you don't like it and it doesn't fit your business model. Now, of course, the music industry would like some protection for itself from the market, which has proven that a much smaller number of people will pay for the product that a record label delivers, which is, strictly speaking, a service-product.

That's right; record labels don't actually deliver anything in terms of a real product. When WMG releases a record, they are essentially a middleman between bands, studios, producers, promoters, advertisers, media outlets, and duplication services. To the best of my knowledge, there are very few labels that have in-house record-duplication services. WMG is not responsible for a single thing that you hold in your hand when you pick up a record at the store, other than some fronted capital. Basically, WMG floats a loan to your favorite band.

But whatever. That's a digression and not fundamentally important to the matter. What is important is that record labels, like a million other corporations on this planet, like to use "free market" as an excuse for "whatever is best for us". The market works both ways, as an information indicator to both parties - consumers and sellers - and everyone else peripherally invovled. Apparently, a lot of people decided that it was more worth their time to install KaZaa and its massive log of spyware onto their computers so that they didn't have to pay $18.99 for the two songs they wanted from that one record by the faceless band. A smaller, but equally important segment of the music consumer base, decided that their favorite bands deserved their money if they put out great records with beautiful packaging and a tracklist of solid songs that spoke to them.

I say all this as someone who doesn't download music, except from .mp3 blogs, and that's, of course, for sampling purposes only. But whatever. Just don't look for someone to protect you against a shifting market paradigm, part of the motion of a free market, and then invoke the very market you want protection from in order to justify it. Have some goddamn integrity.