This line worries me: "...chafe at his insistence on setting uniform prices for their songs and videos on iTunes..." because it ignores keen business insight by presenting it as another example of Jobs's mercurial nature. Joel does a good job of explaining why this is important. It is about the way that the music industry uses pricing as a signal. And Jobs wants to own that signal: "And Apple? Apple wants the signali…
Control or not, Jobs' fixing the price is a good thing for the music industry. A book is usually around $5 for paperback, a movie is usually around $10 in theaters, yet the price of CDs vary from popular to unpopular and that doesn't make any sense.
I regularly buy books I'm not 100% sure I'll like, because it's $5. I go see movies I'm not 100% sure I'll like, because it is ALWAYS $10. I don't buy music I'm not 100% sure I'll like, because it can cost $20 for a popular CD. I've bought DVD boxsets for $20! That's a damn months entertainment for less than a 40-minute album.
The only music I ever buy without hearing nearly every song on the album is from bands I know I like. The problem with this is that I'm a huge music fan, and I can't even remember if I've ever gone a day without listening to music in the last decade; yet I hardly buy any new music, because I can't justify the price risk of getting something bad. I mean its two movies, four books and thats if I'm not going for the $1.50 books off amazon. I once bought around 15 books of amazon because they were all cheap as hell, I haven't even read some of them but the author and publisher still made money off of me, no artist or music company gets free money from me when I'm admittedly stupid enough to allow them to if they had good prices.