Jason Levine
Premium
join:2001-07-13
Albany, NY
| Goose that laid the golden egg
Not to completely repeat a post I made on one of the previous stories about this (I think it was the original one where Jobs said he wasn't going to raise prices), but iTunes is the goose that laid the golden egg to the RIAA. They do virtually no additional work, but merely sit back and let the money pour in.
Estimates of the number of songs that will be sold during 2005 are around 870 million. At $0.99 per song, that's $861.3 million. The RIAA gets a 65% cut of the sales, so that's $559,845,000 just for sitting on their behinds. Sure, CD sales dwarf this figure, but it's still nearly-free money.
So what does the RIAA do? They try to figure out how to squeeze every last penny out of the service regardless if it kills it or not. (The equivalent of torturing the Golden Goose to try to get it to lay platinum eggs because golden just isn't good enough.) And when Steve Jobs refuses to play along, they threaten to just kill off the goose.
The real issue here isn't money, it's control. They handed the keys to the online music industry to Apple early on not realizing how big it could become. Now that Apple's succeeding at it, they want the keys back so they can drive.
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-Jason Levine
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