April 4, 2008 2:52PM

Content Is King…Somebody Please Tell the Record Labels

By Cody Willard

So much focus and, let’s face it, hype around Apple’s claims that they’re now the world’s largest music retailer.

I was long AAPL since the iPod was just about to be rolled out for in large part, as I wrote back in June of 2005 in this article called, “Companies Dream of Apple’s Problems“:

“Apple’s still in the driver’s seat of its future, and I’m still very much enamored of those crazy kids in Cupertino, Calif…

I’ve been saying it for months on end: Apple’s primary profit and stock price driver over the next year will be its computer business. It’s not the iPod or iTunes (although iTunes is going to be increasingly important in the out years, as it displaces Wal-Mart as the largest music retailer in the world)…”

The surprise isn’t that Apple and its instant-gratification music distribution system called iTunes has displaced Wal-Mart’s pain-in-the-butt-gratification music distribution system called Wal-Mart’s cluttered and dirty electronics area. The surprise is that the record labels didn’t realize that was happening before their eyes in 2005. And more to the point, that they’re still clueless as to what to do about the billions of songs traded on the P2P networks every single day.

Still can’t bottom fish those record labels, even if they’re not shorts anymore.