Meanwhile, lots of the anti-iTunes Music Store grousing we're noticing from the Windows side of the fence centers on price-- i.e. 99 cents is just waaaaaay too much money to pay for one piddly little song. This is not entirely unexpected, since most Wintel users wouldn't be Wintel users if it weren't for the fact that, instead of paying a fair price for quality goods and services, they prefer to pay as little money as possible in exchange for... well, utter crap, basically. Not that we're judging, of course; to each his own, it takes all kinds, most people are suckers, etc. etc. etc.

Therein lies Scott Blum's fundamental folly with BuyMusic.com, by the way: yes, 79 cents per song is cheaper than 99 cents (of course, he only offers about three songs that are 79 cents-- whatever), but free via Kazaa is even cheaper, bad karma notwithstanding. (C'mon, if these people had good karma, they wouldn't be stuck using Windows in the first place.) That's presumably why last week the iTMS sold more than twice as many songs as all of its competitors combined, even though BuyMusic.com and MusicMatch Downloads had a potential market twenty times the size of Apple's.

So how, you ask, does Apple expect to make any money selling music to the notoriously cheapskate Wintel market? Answer: they don't. CNET reports that Phil "Gilligan, Drop Those Coconuts" Schiller freely admits that, while the iTMS is "close to profitability," it's "still losing money" overall-- and even when it does squeeze into the black, Apple "doesn't have any illusions that it can make great profits from selling songs over the Internet." In short, says Phil, "the iPod makes money. The iTunes Music Store doesn't." Wow. The last time we encountered anything that blunt, someone was swinging it at our heads.

So, let's think about this for a minute: if Apple (who had a massive infrastructure already in place for the delivery of scads of data over the 'net) can't make a profit on 99-cent songs even when selling in the volume of millions, what hope is there that legal services offering cheaper tunes will stay in business long enough to compete? In other words, unless the record labels decide to lower their wholesale prices to song resellers like Apple, 99 cents is probably the rock-bottom sustainable price we'll see for a while-- and Apple isn't even expecting to make money on the songs at that price. As company execs have stated before, the whole point of the iTMS is to sell iPods.

Incidentally, this ties in directly to another iTMS complaint we keep seeing from Wintel folk: if you buy iTMS songs and you want to take them with you, you "have to buy an iPod." And yes, that's 100% true, at least for now. But guess what? If you're not the sort of Wintel user who'd buy an iPod, Apple doesn't want you as an iTMS customer anyway; unless you also buy that iPod (and maybe eventually a Mac), any songs you purchase from Apple are probably just costing the company money. Let's be clear about this: Apple isn't going after the whole Wintel market with iTunes. It's going after the subset of Windows users who happen to have a little taste, and (more importantly) a little money to spend on iPods and other nifty (and profitable) stuff.

So, bottom line, 99 cents per song is it for a while, and Apple's only real competition price-wise is therefore Kazaa and its ilk; none of the legit services can compete on price and actually make money. If Apple weren't making money on iPod sales, it wouldn't be running the iTMS in the first place; "just trying to have a business around downloadable music would be tough," says Phil.

Once again, Scott Blum gulps audibly and starts to sweat through his suit.