Whats going on with Apple and Time Warner Music/Motorola

Just some speculation to help explain whats been going on in the news this past week. It has been reported that both Apple and Time Warner Music were posturing for upcoming negotiations in Spring of next year on iTunes pricing. I don't think the companies would posture quite so vehemently so early. Considering that iTunes 5.0.1 has a videos button, and pictures of a buy videos link, whats probably happening behind the scenes is negotiations for iTunes to sell music videos. Time Warner Music of course wants to get away from $.99 cent per song pricing (even though they have variable album pricing this isn't good enough), and Apple doesn't want to. So TW wants to use this as leverage to get better video pricing terms.

Re: Motorola
Steve Jobs pulled out of the Paris Expo and he has been quoted that he wanted to release the iPod Nano early. So when he pulled out of the Paris Expo he knew that the reason for this was that he was going to introduce the Nano and the ROKR. Originally the ROKR was going to be announced on its own. Steve Jobs probably knew the availabilty probably wouldn't be immediate after the announcement and knew the phone wasn't that great so he purposely upstaged it with the iPod Nano announcement. Most likely the Motorola CEO knew of this change beforehand, but probably wasn't too happy since he was expecting the media to be buzzing about the ROKR for a few weeks before the Nano announcement. Instead the media generally trashed the ROKR and praised the Nano.