Please note that all blog posts before 8 April 2007 were automatically imported from LiveJournal. To see the comments and any LiveJournal-specific extras such as polls and user icons, please find the source posting at http://brianenigma.livejournal.com/2006/11/Maybe you saw the recent article where Doug Morris, the CEO of Universal Music, states that all iPod owners are thieves, maybe you didn’t. The upshot of the whole thing is that Microsoft is paying Universal $1 for every $250 music player they produce. I guess it’s some kind of retribution or extortion for all the evil music pirates out there. I think that a recent Pacific Coast Hellway comes to a rather excellent and funny conclusion in the opening monologue by Chris:
I think you came down on Doug a little hard there [on a previous episode]. Really, when you think about it, we all owe Doug a huge debt of gratitude for his statements about how all these portable music players are just loaded repositories of stolen music and it’s about time that Universal got paid a licensing fee of $1 out of every $250 for these units. Doug has, for the first time, stepped up to the plate as a corporate citizen and declared the actual value of the songs on one of those units. Think about it. The Microsoft Zune has about 30GB of disk space, which will hold about 10,000 songs. So that $1 they need to get paid is for those 10,000 songs, ’cause you know they’re all stolen. That sets the price of one Universal Music Group song at approximately 1/100th of a penny…. Even better than that, think about this: Universal has gotten paid, so every person who buys a Zune now–guess what? You can download the first 10,000 songs online from any source at all and not pay a single dime extra because Universal’s gotten paid. So go ahead everybody. You buy a Zune and Universal’s got the first 10,000 on them.
