Love your iPod? Your ÜberCool music player and lifestyle accessory which helps define your existence in this world and imparts you with a sense of belonging to the coolest club ever conceived; the club of being in a self contained unit where only you, your music and the feelings which flow thru you when you walk down the street and those bright white wires move back and forth against your black leather jacket?

Is yours, like mine, loaded with every single favorite song you’ve ever had since you were old enough to tell your Father what radio station you were going to listen to in the car when he drove you and your friends to the mall?

Isn’t music great?

Well… guess what? Doug Morris, (pictured above), the chairman and CEO of Universal Music Group, the planet’s biggest record company, hates your fucking guts.

Or, maybe better put… he hates Steve Jobs’ guts, but he also hates yours too. You see, Doug has this little problem. He hates music. Which is pretty funny considering that he’s the CEO of a record company, but it’s true.

What Doug loves is money, lots of it. And according to c|net news, Doug Morris is the one, as I sort-of surmised in my post here, who is pushing Apple to jump on the music subscription bandwagon – probably because everyone and anyone who has tried to make the music subscription model work has failed miserably, and now he’s convinced himself… ‘that if Steve Jobs and Apple, and that ‘Jobsian Reality Distortion Field’ were on-board, well, all of those idiots who gobble up iPods and download music from iTunes like it were candy will fall for this music-rental subscription scheme and gladly fork over some of that loot to his ass.’

Good plan, Doug.

According to c|net news:

Morris has approached Apple with an idea to offer a device that came preprogrammed with Universal Music’s entire library on it, sources told CNET News.com. A music industry source said Wednesday night that Apple has broached the idea of bundling music with the other three major labels but didn’t show much enthusiasm for the plan. “Apple was just inquiring about whether this kind of thing would interest (the other record companies),” said the source.

It’s clear now, two days after The Financial Times broke the news about the Apple-label discussions that Morris, not Jobs, came up with the idea.

According to the article, if I may read between the lines and draw my own conclusions here, Doug Morris wants Apple to develop an iPod-like device which would come bundled with a whole shitload of Universal Group artists’ music, to which you’d get to listen to for a little while, and if you wanted to keep listening to it you’d then have to pay a subscription fee, and if you didn’t pay, all that music would go “poof” and you’d be stuck with a very expensive, but very pretty, (it is Apple we’re talking about here), paperweight.

And this is a good idea exactly how?

Because Doug isn’t merely convinced that he’s been fucked by the MP3 as I surmised here and here, he’s equally convinced that Steve Jobs didn’t give him a reach-around while fucking him with the iPod… so any “New Deal” would include Universal getting a piece of future device sales, and presumably, Doug getting a reach-around. :???:

(Because as everyone knows… the real money is in the hardware, right? Yeah, and that’s what IBM said right before Bill Gates fucked them with MS-DOS, too. That worked out well for IBM, eh Doug? You moron…)

< /silly sarcasm off >

“These guys at Universal,” said one music insider, “are so obsessed with this subscription thing…but there are publishing issues involved with bundling and I don’t think they make much money off it.”

What can’t be overstated is Universal Music’s desire to get a taste of device sales, insiders say. Back when Apple’s iPods became the rage, everybody in the music industry realized they missed an opportunity. While Jobs made pennies on song sales at iTunes, he pocketed 50 percent profits on some iPod models, according to estimates by iSuppli.

It’s safe to say that almost all the major players in the music industry see that as unfair. They argue that what people want isn’t a music player. It’s the music.

That’s why Morris went after–and got–a share of the Zune as well as devices offered by Sirius Satellite Radio, XM Satellite Radio and Nokia.

But the irony just gets worse…err, better? You decide.

According to this article from c|net news:

The days of allowing Apple and other device makers to earn enormous profits off the backs of music artists is over, said the source. For a long time, many in the music industry have chaffed at the success of Apple’s iPod. They acknowledge iPods were expertly designed and marketed, but they argued the gadget’s real attraction was the loads of music that owners could store on them.

“At this stage in the game, the music industry feels it is entitled to something,” said the source.

“Entitled to something”? So, um, like, um… HAVEN’T THE RECORD COMPANIES BEEN EARNING ENORMOUS PROFITS OFF THE BACKS OF MUSIC ARTISTS FOR YEARS DOUG?!?

Ugh.

Tho, it looks like my Macbook/Frisbee got a slight reprieve, and I can only hope that Steve is only entertaining this frigtard just to keep him close so Doug doesn’t go off the reservation and yank all the U2 songs from iTunes.

Welcome to a world of Global Corporate Fascism, where reality is whatever they say it is.