stumbling around drunk in the dark

Wired News: Apple Wants to Open Song Vaults:

On the conference call about the first birthday of the iTunes Music Store, Jobs said that getting [older, out-of-release, or unreleased-on-CD] songs online is one of the next hurdles for online services and the music industry. In general, he said, labels have less than a third of the music in their vaults available for sale because it’s too expensive to distribute such CDs to stores.

But to make songs available online, record companies wouldn’t have to press CDs, get them to stores and worry about returns. “It’s a one-time cost,” Luke said. “Once it’s been encoded and delivered, it’s in the digital marketplace.”

And if anyone can get the labels to open the vaults, Jobs can, analysts said.

“What Jobs is saying is, ‘We’d be happy to take all this content that is rotting away in warehouses and turn it into a new revenue source for you,'” said Barry Ritholtz, a market strategist with Maxim Group, a money-management firm. “It’s probably a bit much to say Jobs is saving the music industry, but he’s showing them the way into the digital age. They have been stumbling around drunk in the dark.”

Fancy that: a guy who loves music is working on making more of it available. Sad that no one in the RIAA cartel ever found this a worthwhile project.