Oh, those wascally, wascally wabbits in the major label music biz! We're all for the iTunes Music Store, and we think Steve Jobs and Apple definitely did a good thing in creating an alternate music distribution model that provides legal instant gratification at reasonable prices, but what a bummer that in order to create a service that most people would actually want to use, Apple had to deal with the devil. Sure, anyone can throw together a music download store, but without the Big Five (or is it Four now?) record labels onboard, any such store's catalog would be devoid of all the major label manufactured music-as-commodity-geared-for-the-lowest-common-denominator that most people would actually want to buy.

So Apple did what it had to, and the result is a wildly successful online music store with over a million songs available for purchase and artists getting fairly compensated for their work-- right? Well, sort of. What happens, of course, is the same thing that happens with any music sold that's created by an artist who's signed a contract with a label: the money goes to the label, and then the label passes along the artist's cut-- at least, in theory. Faithful viewer Frozen Tundra forwarded us an article in The Register which describes how Robert Fripp and King Crimson were effectively cheated out of their royalties by megalabel EMI, who originally advised Fripp "that digital downloads 'were not important'" and therefore his band should have no problem accepting 6 cents per download when EMI took 69. When the band replied that, if the downloads were "not important" anyway, EMI should be willing to give them a bigger cut, the label insisted that it needed all that money "to support the investment in downloading technology."

That's fairly ludicrous, of course, since it was Apple who made all the technical investments in getting the iTMS up and running, and Apple reportedly only gets 4 cents per song. Meanwhile, King Crimson never gave any download rights whatsoever to Virgin (part of EMI, you know), whose distribution deal with the band ended in June anyway-- except that King Crimson songs in the Virgin catalog have apparently been appearing on the iTMS and other services starting in July. EMI's response, when called on this? "We have notified our digital partners a number of times about the loss of rights and believe that we have discharged our obligations to you... if they continue to [exploit your repertoire] you should pursue them for infringement of your rights." Does anyone believe that Apple was the one screwing over King Crimson, here? Especially since EMI apparently kept collecting 69 cents per song sale-- and probably kept the band's 6 cents, too, since the contract had expired anyway.

So the big problem with the iTMS, at least from an artist's perspective, is presumably the same big problem all along: the major labels generally acting like greedy jerks. But we don't believe for a second that Steve Jobs doesn't know about that. Personally, we figure he's either milking the iTMS for iPod sales for as long as he can until the whole music business comes crashing down anyway (at which point he'll move on to the Next Big Thing), or he simply brought the majors on board in order to make the iTMS ubiquitous-- and once it's everywhere (and the lawsuit with the Beatles is settled), Apple will have the power to become essentially a record label in its own right, but working exclusively with downloadable music and dealing directly with the artists to cut out the 69-cents-per-song middleman. What do you think, sirs?