"We're perfectly willing to cut off our noses to spite our face! I mean it! We'll really do it!"

or

"Empty threats as a negotiation tactic - I know it ain't much but it's all I got."

So, what would they do instead of iTunes? iTunes exists in part because music biz execs couldn't get their online act together.

And no, Jobs is not going to give away music for 39 cents or 29 cents a tune.

This Warner guy is just blowing smoke... out his a**. "Negotiation" as said above.

i agree with cooner. i was a huge limewire user until itms. now, i only use it when i can't find it on tms. for the exact reasons cooner states.

that argument is not flawed. i will NOT be going back to a music store. i'll be using satellite radio and streaming radio and just forget about carrying the ipod around everywhere.

How can the (big) labels honestly complain about iTunes pricing? They make more from a download than they do from a physical sale. Apple is making only a few cents per song, almost all of it goes straight to the label.

Hot new artists and songs get their revenue from high sales, not extortionate pricing. And I don't Apple isn't forbidding the labels from lowering the price of back catalog to drive sales.

The real problem is that their product is generally crappy and if consumers are given the choice they will only choose the one or two songs they like from an album and leave the filler on the shelf. The labels depend on forcing full album sales to maintain their profits.

The record labels are proving that they are more interested in extracting money from consumers that they are in providing fair value. When I buy a CD these days I try not to think about who gets the money. It just gives me heartburn.

let the record compaies drop iTMS for all i care. I will just pirate what i can't find on iTMS. I am not above piratinfg my music but i prefer to o it the legal way. I am above buying a whole CD for one song or buying a really expensive CD.

Well I think the younger crowd who's into Top 40 and hip hop and punk would be willing to pay more for the hits. The industry wants to make it a privellege to listen to music on a computer but anyway I too will go back to pirating these labels artists if they do decide to pull out of iTunes. Sony, how do you think I got Evanescence on MY iPod huh? At least another Sony artist Switchfoot publically released a way for us to rip their copy protected CD into iTunes so it's all good.

if the price goes up on a per song basis, presumably it will go up per album. what i'm likely to do is just but a few songs instead of the whole album. at $9.99 for a complete album i don't mind getting the duds, but if it goes up by much, i'll definitely not bother.

I would never pay $3 a song... I might buy a new ringer, once every few months at that price, but I tend to buy a lot more songs a lot more often... I struggle to get friends to even consider buying songs on iTunes at 99 cents a song... They laugh at me at that notion.. They will begin kicking sand in my face if I change the story to $3 a song... Way to go Warner Music, way to piss off your best customers (ones that require no physical product from you, nothing built, replicated, packed, warehoused, shipped, shipped again, etc..)--- If it ain't on iTunes, frankly I ain't buying it to be honest... all the classics, I have on CD or have already bought.. I don't find any new music worth bending over backwards for to be honest-

"It's going to be difficult to get the consumer to stop thinking about owning music, and think about paying for participation instead"

So rather than working to understand and then meeting your customer's needs, let's brainwash them to accept our agenda.

And I'm so sick of execs comparing downloading music to downloading ringtones. You don't download 100s or 1000s of ringtones, so $3 apiece for a snippet of sound is not a big deal.

Finally, if all the record companies cut off Apple...can we say collusion? While I would not consider Apple a monopoly because there are many ways (downloading, CDs, etc), all of the major record labels banding together against a reseller would certainly gain the attention of regulators.

I used to be one of those casual music "pirates"--I don't buy much music, so on the rare occasion I'd hear something interesting on the radio or in a movie, I'd poke around on the internet to find it since there was no way I'm going to spend $15 and either drive to a store or wait for Amazon to ship a CD just to get one song that I only wanted to listen to a couple times on a whim anyway--by the time I got the song I wouldn't care anyway.

Even then I didn't much care for downloading both on principle and the crappy quality and how hard it was to find the right thing.

When the iTMS came out, it was great, because I could easily find (and preview) exactly the song I want and buy it for a buck legally, which is low enough that I can make no-thought purchases. When they eventually started adding more obscure albums that were quite hard to find anywhere else, I spent more there--I've bought more music on iTMS in the last month than I had in any recent year.

And now greedy record companies think that pulling their music because Apple won't let them double the price on a song that isn't even worth $1 to begin with is going to help their business... I don't think so. Me, I'm certainly going to be spending less on Warner music, not more, and as time goes on I wonder if people like me won't end up as the majority of consumers.

The painful irony of it is that they've got to be making about the same profit off of $10 albums on the iTMS as they do off of anything in a store--a hot new CD never sells for more than $16 or so, and you know a significant chunk of that must be going into the retail channel, while at least $7 of the $10 iTMS charges ends up in their pocket.

Wasn't the whole point of their online sales to curb piracy because people didn't like spending $20 for a disc when they only want one song? This would probably just force them to resort back to illegal p2p software instead of some place that barely supports the iPod...

another good question, name me 5 good reasons that raising prices would improve online music for consumers. Warner Execs were saying that having all music at $.99/track was bad for the consumer because it went againt free market pricing. Obviously there's an equilibrium price point for any particular music track, and it could very likely be over $.99/track for many of them. But the model itself is the key to iTMS's popularity. A 13-year old kid with their $25 music card knows exactly what they're going to get: 25 of their favorite songs (or maybe a bit more if they buy whole albums). Pepsi and 7-11 can partner w/ Apple and package songs with colored sugar water. It all works because its simple and people know what to expect.

This reminds me of when coke executives tried to design vending machines that raised the price on coke when the weather was hot, and claimed this would be a wonderful boon for consumers because it allowed them to tailor their pricing to demand. Of course, prices didn't go down when the weather got cold... the outcry was such that they had to cancel the project.

The ONLY reason I use the iTunes Music Store is because it is far faster to find a good quality version of songs I want to hear. My time is too valuable and I am too impatient to find a well encoded copy via peer to peer.

I am willing to pay a buck for that convenience. You are foolish if you believe I will pay any more than that.

There is only one word for reaction to "labels might have no other choice than to cut off Apple's digital music sales in one swift "decapitation" move" and that is CARTEL.

Talk like this just confirms what we've known for a long time, that the small number of major labels colludes to set prices and define terms collectively.

Appropriate investigations by consumer/competition/fair trade bodies around the world should investigate this

... I will never again pay for a track from any of the big music companies. Cutting off iTunes would be an admission by the RIAA that music piracy is their new distribution model and that they no longer wish to sell tracks. What a bunch of f****** idiots.