Cynicism is the last refuge of the idealist

Warner raises decapitation strategy for Apple

It’s obviously the week for the arrogance of the record companies to show through - today’s batch of idiocy comes from Michael Nash, Warner’s digital strategy chief.

What if Jobs says 39 cents or 29 cents per download - what then? The industry can say, OK we’ll cut him of - very few people people buy music from digital downloads,” said Nash, who pointed out that most of the music on iPods is from their own collections.

Now there’s a good way to encourage people to buy in to digital downloads - threaten to stop them happening

And how about this little corker

“It’s going to be difficult to get the consumer to stop thinking about owning music, and think about paying for participation instead,” said one executive.

So actually these arrogant bastards really want to get us enslaved to paying them over and over again for their music - they need to go out of business, all of them

This story just get’s juicier - a quote from Macuser follows:

Suspicions that elements of the record industry are becoming increasingly divorced from reality were given further weight last week when Tommi Kyyrä from the Finland offices of the IFPI (International Federation of Phonographic Industries) justified DRM technologies on CDs by saying that consumers have no automatic right to be able to play music on computers.
‘Now, we need to understand that listening to music on your computer is an extra privilege,’ he said. ‘Normally people listen to music on their car or through their home stereos. If you are a Linux or Mac user, you should consider purchasing a regular CD player.

Hmmmmm. Maybe we should just get a list of all your artists and boycott them - what these arrogant greedy bastards need to learn is that they don’t have an automatic right to our money

How’s this for being greedy??

The big record companies, in addition to the gazillions of pounds they bleed from consumers by charging so much for digital downloads, now think they should be entitled to a share of teh profits from the iPod

“Not all songs are created equal — not all time periods are created equal,” Mr. Bronfman told those assembled at Goldman Sachs’ Communacopia investor conference. “We want, and will insist upon having, variable pricing.” His words were reported in an article on the Red Herring Web site.

Mr. Bronfman then upped the ante by describing his industry as “the arms supplier in the device wars between Samsung, Sony, Apple and others.” He insisted: “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.”

As for variable pricing, Mr. Bronfman was quick to point out that “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.”

the sheer greed of these people stagger me - they know that they are enjoying their last gasp of having any large-scale earnings since it is only a matter of time before they are superfluous and are trying to wring every lastdrop out of the stone before they go bankrupt

Everyone knows that it is inevitable that piracy will rise once again if they put the prices up - it is a ridiculous position to take