Two and a half years after the music business lined up behind the chief executive of Apple, Steven P. Jobs, and hailed him and his iTunes music service for breathing life into music sales, the industry's allegiance to Mr. Jobs has eroded sharply.
Mr. Jobs is now girding for a showdown with at least two of the four major record companies over the price of songs on the iTunes service.
If he loses, the one-price model that iTunes has adopted - 99 cents to download any song - could be replaced with a more complex structure that prices songs by popularity. A hot new single, for example, could sell for $1.49, while a golden oldie could go for substantially less than 99 cents.
Music executives who support Mr. Jobs say the higher prices could backfire, sending iTunes' customers in search of songs on free, unauthorized file-swapping networks.
Signs of conflict over pricing issues are increasingly apparent. This month, Apple started its iTunes service in Japan without songs from the two major companies - Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group - leaving artists like Avril Lavigne, Beyonc=E9 and Rob Thomas out of the catalog because the companies refused to license their music to iTunes, executives involved in the talks said.
It's puzzling. Jobs found a way to get people to pay to download music from the Web, giving the majors a model for selling music online. And now the big labels want to destroy it. Could it be that big music isn't getting a large enough piece of the action from the iTunes music store?
At the price of 99 cents a song, the share of the major labels is about
70 cents.If someone told me they would market and sell my product for me, and hand over 70 percent of the take (all while I stayed home in bed), I'd be inclined to go along with it.
This all reminds me of a scene you might see in an old-fashioned gangster flick, where the mobsters walk into a successful businessman's shop and say, "Nice little place you've got here. Be a shame if anything was to ... happen ... to it."=20