In a sign of where power now rests in the music industry, music label heads “operated in fear” Apple might pull their albums from the dominant iTunes store, according to a Monday report.
In a behind-the-scenes post-mortem of the recent agreement creating a multi-tiered pricing arrangement for songs sold on iTunes, Apple was able to get labels to give up their piracy fears and sell their songs through the iPhone, the New York Times reported.
A breakthrough occurred after Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Sony’s chairman got into a Christmas Eve shouting match. Soon afterwards, the lone hold-out signed-onto the agreement, according to the report.
Talking to anonymous music executives, the newspaper paints a picture where Apple controls the future: wireless downloads of music.
While iTunes sold $1.8 billion in 2008, the amount is dwarfed by wireless sales that reached $70 billion during the same period.
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
