You can read the article here, but basically the Zune is being officially launched tomorrow and Microsoft struck up a deal with UMG to provide some money to UMG for each Zune sold, letting them in on the profit. When I first heard about this yesterday, I thought it made a tad bit of business sense and didn’t directly angry me. Yes, this would probably set a precedent and other companies like Apple would have to charge a fee to pay to the music groups and everything could get ugly, but I had thought that Microsoft was doing this as a gesture of peace between the “digital life” community and the record companies. That’s not what happened.

“UMG refused to license its music to the Zune unless it could receive a percentage of each device sold, in addition to standard music licensing fees for downloads and subscriptions.”

That right there has some issues because evidently the music groups are getting even greedier than before. Are they going to start boycotting their customers? Let’s not sell music because we don’t get enough money from it….

Then the punch line, “These devices are just repositories for stolen music, and they all know it,” UMG chairman/CEO Doug Morris says. “So it’s time to get paid for it.”

This just infuriates me and makes me wonder who in the world put this guy in charge of a company. I’m not a business owner, but I’m pretty sure that you aren’t supposed to nationally upset your current customers, let alone any potential ones. I admit to having music that I haven’t purchased in my library. However, that is a very small percentage. I wasn’t in the whole Napter/mp3 thing way back, I just bought the CDs that I liked and ripped them on my computer. Then iTunes came around and for the ease/quality/price, I was hooked. Heck, I even PAY to get most of my TV shows from the iTunes Store. Don’t even get me started on the amount of money I’ve spent on Law and Order: SVU, Bones, or various other music singles and albums. Evidently I’m a thief because I own an iPod however.

I don’t want to make anyone else angry, but I could justify this a bit if we were talking strictly about Windows using iPod owners. To generalize, Windows users aren’t as excited about their computer and don’t have as much offense about downloading anything, ie, pirating software. However, I don’t know of any Mac users that pirate software. The software on the Mac is great and I, for one, am more than happy to pay the shareware developers when they have done a good job.

All in point though, it is just horribly business practice to publicly come out and say that your past buyers are theives. I’m not going to boycott the label simply because I don’t wanna make the effort. I’ll continue to make my purchases from the iTunes Store. However, I sure as hell won’t be buying any CDs ever again and if I do happen to notice that UMG is the group behind that hot single I want, well, I might just take them up it and become a statistic of theirs.

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