You know, as much as we love the iTunes Music Store (and trust us-- we do), it took us practically a whole year to work up the courage to buy an album we didn't already own in some form or another. We just had a really hard time working through some of the issues, you know? Like, iTMS albums don't come with lyric booklets. The "cover art" is just a low-res scan of the booklet's front page. Songs that were recorded to flow together from one track to the next wind up having little skips in between. At 128 kpbs AAC, the music sounds good, but we're still buying a lossily-encoded version of the actual CD track. And despite all that, at $9.99, downloading an album from the iTMS is only marginally cheaper than buying the actual CD and encoding it ourselves, especially if we buy it secondhand.

So it wasn't until just a few weeks ago that our need for instant gratification won out over our misgivings about owning a shadow of the recording instead of the recording itself. (For the curious, we finally took the plunge on the day that Guilt Show came out, because we were too lazy to drive to Newbury Comics.) We finally buckled and decided that ten bucks isn't that bad a price for a reasonable facsimile of the real thing, especially if we can start listening to it twenty seconds after clicking "BUY ALBUM" and we don't have to put on shoes or actually-- horrors of horrors-- leave the house.

But wouldja believe that, while the rest of us wrestle with the question of whether $9.99 is too much for an incomplete digital representation of a physical CD, the Big 5 major labels are all convinced that ten bucks is far too cheap? 'Strue! The Wall Street Journal reports that, caving to industry pressure, the iTMS has been selling Fly or Die by N.E.R.D. for $16.99-- although now it's $13.99, so we're not sure if that was an Apple "price adjustment" or a WSJ error, but in any event, it's still 50 cents more expensive than the actual, non-lossy, complete-with-booklet physical CD at Amazon.com. Instant gratification is one thing, but this is starting to look a little ridiculous.

Furthermore, reportedly the Big 5 are "discussing ways to boost the price of single-song downloads on hot releases" to as high as $2.49, which is the final and incontestable proof-- as if there were any doubt in your mind-- that the major labels are all the spawn of Satan. Geezers like ourselves may recall that when CDs were just starting to show up alongside vinyl records (yes, kids, we spun slabs of vinyl on a round flat thing and dragged a needle along their grooves, and that's how we made music by which we could paint stick figures on our cave walls), they cost more than records even though they were technically cheaper to produce; the recording industry said, "hey, don't worry-- once the format catches on and CDs become more popular, we'll lower the price to pass the manufacturing savings onto you." Remember how that, um, never happened? Because this whole price hike on song downloads, with their zero manufacturing costs, is like déjà vu all over again.

Personally, our favorite part of this whole thing is how the major labels are blaming the stores: "retailers, not record companies, ultimately set the prices consumers pay." Uh... rrrrright. Even if that were true, all that means is that the labels are raising download prices on purpose to encourage people to buy the physical CDs instead, presumably because the extra paper and plastic consumed hastens the demise of the planet. (It's the whole "spawn of Satan" thing, remember?) So anyway, try and enjoy the 99-cent songs and $9.99 albums while you can, folks, because it sounds like the major labels are doing everything they can to foment a bloody coup. Everybody grab something blunt and heavy!