Lame ass. Heh.; What music labels really want

A writer for Japan Today calls the efforts of Sony and other companies as "lame ass" in their attempts to get back what the iPod and iTMS has taken from them in a matter of a few months. I was surprised that a Japanese would actually use this kind of term. But it turns out that the writer is not even Japanese. Anyway, Terrie Lloyd writing for Japan Today says that Sony has slashed the prices of their songs available for download by 15% per cent, and they have released digital music players that will try to compete with the iPod, and matched the prices to boot. But, according to Lloyd, this is a lame ass effort as Sony's version of iTMS only has 200,000 songs in its catalogue (against iTMS's 1,000,000+) and that they iPod is much more sexier and cheaper.

I just read an interesting idea on why music labels want the fixed pricing in iTMS gone. According to Joel Spolsky, the multi-tiered pricing scheme will be used as a form of blackmail to be used against artists. He explains that a higher priced will mean "good" while the lower priced song will mean "crap." If a musician will become too needy or demanding, all the label will have to do is "threaten" the artist will a downgrade of the price for his songs. Sounds like an interesting conspiracy theory.