If users can’t buy Universal music for their iPods from iTunes

Stu says:

I wouldn’t be too worried about Universal if I was Apple. People don’t buy iPods so that they can use iTunes, they use iTunes and the iTunes store because they already have an iPod. If Universal doesn’t sell their stuff on iTunes (which works because it is the most convenient way to get music when you have an iPod), people will just steal it, copy it to iTunes, and put it on their iPod. Apple gets little revenue from digital sales relative to their hardware sales so it doesn’t hurt them close to as much as it hurts Universal. A very small percentage of songs that are on people’s digital music players are purchased online. The rest or copied from CD or downloaded illegaly. These will still continue to happen and if Universal wants to cut their digital sales revenue and have it replaced with stolen digital files, that’s up to them. Universal is still too stupid to realize how the market actually works and is unwilling to adapt to it. Next year they will lose more sales but still won’t adapt, so the following year they’ll lose more sales again, and so on. It’s like a company putting out a rotary dial phone to compete with the iPhone. It would be rediculous. As is Universal’s position on digital music.

I think they still don’t realize that the monopoly of record labels doesn’t exist anymore with the cost of home recording equipment, digital distribution, and the internet allowing access to more artists than was available when people only heard music that was played on the radio, which was controled by labels.