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In an editorial for Hits, Brummel, who has steadfastly refused to licence any content from his Victory Records label, asks why the record companies agreed to provide free [sic] content to Apple without negotiating a cut of iPod revenues

'Without the music industry, their site and their iPods are useless,' he claims.

'Since when do record companies give their content away without extracting an advance?' he asks. 'If the major record companies wanted to take a stand they would PULL their content. But, if they all pulled their content in unison, Apple would claim collusion... I say, pull it anyway. The defective hard drives are making people deaf as it is.'

He also rails against single track downloads, arguing that it cannibalises album sales and is detrimental to the artists.

'It is important for people to experience the entire album. Not just a track(s),' he argues. 'The artist went into the studio and created a body of work. If you were buying a painting from Picasso, would you have said, "Look Pablo. I like

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this painting man. But I only like that corner part with the tree and the guy's finger. How about you chop off that corner and I give you $1 instead of $10 for the painting? '

Albums, he says, are a work of art where the lyrics and sequencing of tracks tell a story.

'iTunes makes music disposable,' he concludes. 'It makes it a faceless impulse item. It steals its soul.'

Brummel's views are at odds with those of the major US labels who albeit begrudgingly credit Apple with almost single-handedly reviving their industry after years of declining CD sales. But Brummel argues that labels should forget about the four per cent of their business - worth $1.1bn, he might have said - that iTunes generates and instead concentrate on the 96 per cent that is traditional retail.

'Traditional retail supports music 1,000 times more than iTunes does,' he says. 'If someone does not want to leave their house, they can go to our webstore, Amazon or the hundreds of other online sites that sell music. For the very casual consumer, there are digital consumption models that will work when and if properly deployed. People are using iTunes because they like the iPod. When Dell [which has scaled down its presence in the portable music market] or Samsung makes a better device, iTunes will lose relevancy.'

Brummel is not the only music industry boss to call for Apple to hand over a proportion of its iPod income, Edgar Bronfman, CEO of Warner Music, having made a similar appeal last September. Ironically he was responding to comments made by Apple CEO Steve Jobs who said the labels were greedy for demanding higher iTunes prices for some tracks.