Jackass of the Week: Yahoo Music’s Ian Rogers

In a post on the Yahoo Music Blog trumpeting the positive reviews for the new Wi-Fi-enabled Sansa Connect (which features integration with Yahoo), Ian Rogers justifies the $12/month subscription fee thusly (boldface added):

For those of you about to complain about the $12/month to get unlimited tracks (like, um, Steve Jobs), check yourself before you riggity wreck yourself. Labels and artists get paid for every radio play and every Yahoo! Music download to the Sansa Connect, whereas we all know iPods are mostly full of not-paid-for MP3s. At Yahoo! we would like to help maintain a healthy music business, compensating labels and artists at a fair price to consumers.

What a great pitch to get iPod users to switch to the Sansa: accuse them of being thieves.

My money says that what most iPods are full of are songs ripped — legally — from iPod owners’ CD collections. But even if I’m wrong, the Sansa Connect plays MP3 files, making it just as easy to use with bootlegged music files as an iPod.

★ Wednesday, 11 April 2007