Is Steve Jobs caving to pressure from record labels to allow more "flexible" pricing for songs sold through iTunes? EMI Music CEO Alain Levy seems to think so.

Jobs has been steadfast in asserting that raising song prices above the 99 cent ceiling would ruin the song download market. He called the labels greedy, amoung other things. Labels have shot back that some songs are worth more than 99 cents, while others are worth less than 99 cents. While that might be true... who decides? Not the marketplace, surely.

The labels will certainly set pricing on the songs based on what artist did it. You can bet a new single by Britney Spears will cost more to download than a new single by a lesser-known band... even if the song is better and winds up being a bigger hit. They'll raise the price then, to be sure, but is it fair to let record companies arbitrarily decide which songs costs more?

Anyway, Levy thinks we'll see a price increase within 12 months. I hope Jobs' spine is stiffer than that.

Click here to read the article at CNet.com.

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Wired.com's Bruce Schneier analyzes the Sony Rootkit Saga. If you haven't heard about it already, Sony released music CDs that installed a stealth, spy-ware type program on unsuspecting PC user's computers.

It was quickly discovered by the geek community that this rootkit introduced serious security flaws onto your PC. A virus taking advantage of this came out very shortly after.

My favorite quote from the article comes from Thomas Hesse, Sony BMG's president of global digital business: "Most people don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"

You just gotta love that! Hell, most people don't know what freaking spyware is... why should they care about that either? I mean, who cares if your computer runs as slow as molasses?

Click here to read the real story of Sony's rootkit at Wired.com.

Click here to read another Wired story about Sony's recall of affected (infected?) CDs.

Also related, it would seem that Sony's rootkit ripped off some open source coders to boot. Click here to check out the article on that at CNet.com.

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Jac Holzman released The Doors first album 40 years ago on his independent label, Electra Records. Now, he is behind the first "download only" record label - backed by the Warner Music Group. It is called Cordless and launches today on the web and on services such as iTunes and Real Networks.

Songs are sold in 3-tune groupings instead of a whole album. And, in keeping with the Indy Label tradition, contracts are short and artists get to keep ownership of the master recordings. From the article:

"Independent record making is a process and a point of view and a flexibility," Holzman said, noting that he and his partners have already agreed to sign bands just hours after hearing them. "There's a nimbleness that larger companies, where decision mechanisms have become cumbersome, have lost."

The idea is to promote new bands without having to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in the process. The plan is to release the 3-song "clusters" over a year or two to give new groups a chance to build audience and to "grow artistically."

I think this will be the norm in about 5 years time. The current business model for music distribution is on the way out... as millions of P2P file sharers will concur.

Click here to read the article at Wired.com.

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Chan Nai-ming, otherwise known as "Big Crook" on the internet, was sentenced to three months in jail for uploading 3 movies to a website so it could be downloaded through Bittorrent. A month a movie...

Chan is apparently the first person to be convicted of file-sharing using the Bittorrent client.

What movies, you ask? Daredevil, Red Planet and Miss Congeniality. For future reference, if you're going to risk jailtime for sharing movies, you should choose better quality movies to share... I hate to go to jail over a movie like Miss Congeniality or those other two bombs. How embarrasing for you, Chan!

Click here to read the article at Wired.com.

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