Highway To $0.99 Hell
Apple's iTunes music store: A rockin' revolution, or same ol' corporate song and dance?
by Mark Morford

Damn but how I'd love to believe that a nice hefty portion of the 99 cents I just dropped in the wonderfully simple and elegant and it's-about-goddamn-time Apple iTunes Music Store for Björk's glorious "Bachelorette" is going straight into Björk herownself's orange fur-lined pocket. You know?

Instead of where I know my money is really going, which is straight toward some Universal records exec's Range Rover payments, with the remainder right into the vault inside Steve Jobs' gold-trimmed bedchamber. And most likely not a single dime to the artist who wrote and recorded and sang the actual music.

This is the tragic flaw, the biggest disappointment of Apple's much-vaunted service. It is the underlying unfair evil that, if you're at all aware of the music industry's long-standing vow to gouge your ass to high heaven and screw their own artists out of royalties and keep the prices of antiquated CDs artificially high and continue to promote slick prefab hit makers to the detriment of new, quirky, more talented indie acts, bites your attuned consumerist butt every step of the way. Apple could've gone for revolution. They settled for mild rebellion.
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