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Last week marked a celebratory milestone for music lovers when Sony BMG licensed their catalog for DRM-free digital distribution on Amazon.com. 89 to 99 cents to purchase a song which changed your life. Not bad. Prior to the Japanese-German combo joining, you were walking into a record store with a pretty extensive void in the middle. Imagine a conventional record store minus 25% or so of music you know and want not being available.

Of course, as physical media grows in weekly offerings, it’s nearly impossible to have enough shelf space to dedicate to having just about every album you may want, available to take to a register. It was possible maybe a decade ago to have a Tower Records in a prime location in every major city around the world with a vast amount of space for music, but given the one-two punch of physical music sales dropping and real estate prices in cities going through the literal roof, it will be difficult to reestablish the Tower of tomorrow. Amoeba seems to be the only great white hope.

But this leads up to the strong rumor (and why you see Petra Haden’s cover art of her great The Who Sell Out tribute up there) that Pepsi and Amazon are teaming up for a Superbowl (sorry, I know the NFL would prefer if you said The Big Game) announcement about a billion song giveaway. Gives nice momentum to the notion that iTunes isn’t the only game in town, but at the end of the day, Apple cares mostly about selling hardware anyway. iTunes is not a big money-generator for Apple… which makes you wonder. If they aren’t hitting financial gold with their store, why would anyone besides Amazon, who are more keen on selling higher-margin items than songs, try to create an environment to sell a la carte songs?

Sigh. But back to the music… can you think of songs which debate the art vs. commerce issue? “This Note’s For You” by Neil Young (with genius music video) and “EMI” by the Sex Pistols come to mind…

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