In today’s news, iTMS Aus­tralia launches with­out Sony, pre­sum­ably because they’re greedy, uncom­pro­mis­ing bas­tards. I’d like to be sued for defama­tion on that com­ment (because, you know, they’d get awarded such mas­sive dam­ages for a blog this size), because then at least the real rea­son would come out, either way. I’m inclined to think they’re far more evil than Apple, but per­haps that’s just PR spin. Hav­ing said that, here’s evi­dence to the con­trary from an AppleTalk Aus­tralia inter­view with CD Baby founder, Derek Sivers:

Keep in mind : Apple is not screw­ing musi­cians. Labels are screw­ing musi­cians. Apple pays 70 cents per 99-cent down­load. If the artist has signed their music over to a label, they don’t own their music any­more. The label does. So Apple pays the label 70 cents per song, and the label pays the artist… what… a penny? Two? Noth­ing at all? But when an artist is NOT signed to a label, when they’re going through CD Baby for exam­ple, we only keep a 9% cut and pay 91% of all income directly to the artists every week. Our account­ing is wide open so they can see every dol­lar every day, and it all goes to the artist every week, with­out fail, for over 7 years now.

Also, I’ve just dis­cov­ered that iTunes users, even on Win­dows, can rip CDs with sup­posed “Copy Con­trol” tech­nol­ogy with­out even hav­ing to resort to the typ­i­cal Shift key “hack” (heh, and, in the US, press­ing Shift at that point in time is entirely ille­gal. Remove those copy­right cir­cum­ven­tion devices from your key­boards, Amer­ica!!) to pre­vent the load­ing of sup­posed restrict­ing tech­nolo­gies. I guess this means iTunes is now ille­gal under the DMCA, too?

For the record, the CD in ques­tion was Placebo’s 2003 “Sleep­ing with Ghosts” album, pub­lished by Vir­gin. At least they didn’t have the audac­ity to use the stan­dard CD logo on it (because these copy-control things are out­side of Red Book spec).