Okay, if you weren't born in the early-to-mid-'70s, just pretend like you were while we ask you this question: can you believe it's the 20th anniversary of Band Aid's first release? Man. We've still got a copy of "Do They Know It's Christmas?"-- the original, baby!-- on vinyl in a box somewhere several hundred miles west of here. Now it's two decades later, and they've put out a (vastly less-popular, apparently) redone version in the UK-- but what's this? It's not available at the iTunes Music Store in any country. Panic! Consternation! Uproar!

Somebody out there really, really cares about this. We can feel it.

Honestly, there is some drama here; indeed, the media's trying to make it sound like some epic battle between the forces of good and evil, stirring tales of which will one day be passed down from generation to generation in the sacred songs of the tribal elders. Interestingly enough, though, it's Apple that seems to be getting cast in the "force of evil" role, as it plays the unfeeling monopolistic market leader preventing zillions of sales of this song that would wipe out all disease, famine, and human suffering if only The Man weren't keeping it down. Faithful viewer Bradley Bishop clued us in to the way in which several news outlets (for instance, The Times) are reporting that Apple has "refused to sell" the new song "because it would damage the company's dominance of the download market." Boo hiss and all that, right?

But is it really Apple that's refusing to play ball? The deal-killer here is apparently that Universal, the label handling the song, is insisting that Apple sell the song for £1.49, almost double the iTMS UK's standard 79p price, because it "must maximize the cash raised from each sale." Now, as we've already seen, Apple certainly isn't averse to bending some iTMS rules in order to help out a worthy charity, provided that it doesn't have to mess with its customers to do it. Apple sacrificing its cut of all sales of ASAP, for example, doesn't affect the customer experience one iota; selling a popular song at a different price, though, would disrupt the uniformity of the iTMS price structure and undermine one of the service's most attractive features.

According to The Times, "because of iTunes's dominance of the online market, Apple's refusal to sell the track could reduce the revenues raised through online sales by 70 percent." That casts Apple as the genetic hybrid of Scrooge and the Grinch, but anyone with a passing acquaintance with the concept of "math" will probably agree that if Apple were allowed to sell the song at its normal 79p rate, the increased sales to the iPod crowd would more than offset the lower price. Why should Universal worry about "maximizing the cash raised from each sale" instead of maximizing the cash taken in overall? Especially since Universal has nothing to lose, since its per-sale cost of song download sales is practically nonexistent. Not letting Apple sell the song for its regular 79p price is effectively depriving the charity of tens of thousands of pounds, so who's really "refusing" to lend the Africans a hand, here?

Now, we may be the poster children for unchecked corporate paranoia, but let's not forget that the major labels (Universal included) have been trying to strongarm Apple into pricing popular songs higher than others for ages now. What better way to force the issue than to hide behind a charity song and make Apple look like the bad guy? Allowing the "fastest selling single of the year" to be priced higher than others is the first step down a slippery slope, after all. Not that we're saying that Apple's a saint or anything, but in light of the company's contribution to the ASAP project (without so much as a press release to shine its halo), we're far more inclined to believe in the sincerity of Apple's charitable efforts than Universal's. C'mon, who'd you rather have marrying your sister: Steve Jobs or an RIAA lawyer?