Here’s another line from Lynn Hirshberg’s profile of Rick Rubin in the NYT Magazine:

One problem with iTunes is that, with some exceptions, all the songs are priced equally — a Justin Timberlake smash costs the same as an Al Jolson classic. Since a listener would, ideally, pay more for a Top 10 hit, that egalitarian system costs record companies potential millions of dollars.

Why doesn’t Apple allow record companies to set their own iTunes rates? Why does Steve Jobs even care? His argument at the first was that ease of use and consistency was needed to train a skeptical audience to use a new medium. Does that rationale still work? Here’s the argument for the 99 cent model:

1) Aesthetics. Apple is all about clean surfaces and simplicity. Ninety-nine cents for songs, $1.99 for TV shows, $9.99 for movies … What’s not to understand?

2) Business philosophy. Apple is a refutation of all the scams that prevail in the computer market, from all the crapware you get on your computer when you buy it to the many cheesy little ways companies from AOL to HP to Best Buy work at scrabbling a few extra bucks out of their customers’ pockets. Now, of course if consumers didn’t like it on some level they wouldn’t put up with it; it’s the price we pay for the ever-lowering costs of computing. But: it also means that the companies are always going to flirt with the line of what they can get away with, from quality control to customer support. Eventually the companies that go too far will pay a price, and, again, the upside is ever-cheaper computers in general. The down side, though, is the small but real chance that you the customer will get hosed in particular. Jobs knows that opening the door this way will soon create a mass of fake “deals,” customer complaints, and price gouging on his site.

3) History. It’s not entirely the cause of the current crisis, but at least some of the record business’s problem is based on the financial and legal corruption that permeates the industry. Raise prices whenever possible; pay off radio stations to play songs no one wants to hear; and screw artists out of royalties. Those are three key pillars of the music industry, and over time this created a big public reservoir of ill will. Jobs is trying to prevent that from happening again. Why? Well…

4) Reality. Because the companies don’t control the music any more. In reality, the music is available for free. And not just on the file-sharing networks. Mp3 blogs, mp3 discs, memory sticks … there are myriad ways for folks to move data—I mean, music—around at an extraordinary rate and it’s only going to get worse. Folks don’t have to use the iTunes Store. It might be that the best thing the industry can do is start being as nice as possible to consumers lest they just forget the companies exist entirely.

Which is probably the future right there, and not even Rick Rubin can stop it from happening.