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The CEO of Warner Music has hit back Steve Jobs' jibe that record companies are being 'greedy' by demanding higher prices for music downloads.

Edgar Bronfman said that the price of downloads should reflect the popularity of the artist and described Apple's one-price-fits-all approach as 'unfair'.

'There's no content that I know of that does not have variable pricing,' Bronfman said at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference. 'Not all songs are created equal - not all time periods are created equal. We want, and will insist upon having, variable pricing.'

Jobs argued last week that raising prices will only result in an

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increase in file sharing and pointed out that the labels make more money from a song sold on the iTunes Music Store than they do from the same track on a CD.

Bronfman also called for a share of the iPod revenues to be distributed to the record companies.

'We are selling our songs through iPod, but we don't have a share of iPod's revenue,' he said. 'We want to share in those revenue streams.'

Presumably he will soon be demanding a share of radio stations and record shops' profits (see the latest Joy of Tech cartoon for a twisted take on Bronfman's comments).

Suspicions that elements of the record industry are becoming increasingly divorced from reality were given further weight last week when Tommi Kyyrä from the Finland offices of the IFPI (International Federation of Phonographic Industries) justified DRM technologies on CDs by saying that consumers have no automatic right to be able to play music on computers.

'Now, we need to understand that listening to music on your computer is an extra privilege,' he said. 'Normally people listen to music on their car or through their home stereos. If you are a Linux or Mac user, you should consider purchasing a regular CD player.'

His comments were later removed from the article.