So Telefonica become the latest in a long line of multinational companies testing the limits of the Irish consumer’s gullibility. Not content with matching the iPhone dollar price in euros, they also reckon that Irish punters are willing to settle for significantly reduced packages when compared to the UK offer.

As Pat Phelan says, there is no cost difference in terminating minutes in Ireland or the UK.

America, behold your Internet. Keep it full of paper and toner, because your economy depends upon it!

Recently, beleaguered music companies discovered that what Steve Jobs has been doing to them for the last few years is what they’d been doing to consumers for many years previous to that and guess what? It hurts!

Then over the weekend at Midem, Qtrax boldly ventured forth with its ad-supported free download business model- ‘From today, feel free to download another 25 million songs - legally’

Sadly no deals had been finalised. As Bart the Amnaoiseach would say, it was all ’smokes and daggers’. You couldn’t make up such ineptness - according to themselves, Qtrax have been working on this for 4 years.

Kudos to the Qtrax PR people for getting the (wrong) word out there, but surely they realised who they were trying to play hardball with? When I initially scanned the Times article I was surprised that the big four music companies were actually doing something to try and loosen Apple’s firm grasp on their online revenues.

However it seems that isn’t the case. We can look forward to more attempted litigation aimed at filesharers in jurisdictions outside the US. We can also look forward to a continued stream of focus-group identified pre-chewed ‘music’ which we didn’t ask for. I’m looking at you, Louis Walsh,

a man who still equates artistic worth with financial success as that allows him to cast himself as a sort of modern-day Phil Spector, instead of someone who makes his living selling children’s music to slow adults.

Thank you Graham Linehan

The £500K (Sterling) launch party, the hype, the advertising-supported business model, it’s all sounding awfully familiar. I’m also taken with the eagerness of understaffed weekend newsrooms to reprint press releases. Some things never change.

Of course, it could be a fiendishly clever reverse-hype anti-marketing campaign. Mention of Qtrax will waft around the web for a while, then just when the buzz is dying down the CEOs of Warners, Sony, EMI and BMG will appear on the (obviously inferior) screens of non-Apple MP3 players. Dressed as the Fab Four, they’ll tell us that it was all just a clever jape, and if you point your browser to Ptrax.com you can download up to at least 300 free songs. Yay!

If you’re still interested, have a look at Qtrax. Will they still be around at the end of the year?

Edit: Excellent piece in the Guardian.

Seth Godin does have a knack for stating the obvious / rephrasing what is already well known. The fact that he makes a very good living out of it shows that a lot of people have a habit of unnecessarily complicating things. Like those incurious bankers in CitiBank and Merril Lynch. Now that people outside the rarefied circles of financial engineering are becoming belatedly curious about CDOs and other esoteric beasts, it seems the bankers don’t actually know where they’ve squirelled away their imaginary money.

Not to worry, interest rate cuts will sort out anything.