Similar to a report on Friday from The Mac Observer, The New York Times reported over the weekend that Apple CEO Steve Jobs is on a collision course with a number of major record labels that could see the price of music downloads going up in the near future.

"Signs of conflict over pricing issues are increasingly apparent," the newspaper reported. "Mr. Jobs is now girding for a showdown with at least two of the four major record companies over the price of songs on the iTunes service. If he loses, the one-price model that iTunes has adopted - US$0.99 cents to download any song - could be replaced with a more complex structure that prices songs by popularity. A hot new single, for example, could sell for $1.49, while a golden oldie could go for substantially less than 99 cents."

The report said some music executives are siding with Mr. Jobs and arguing against price rises, saying, "higher prices could backfire, sending iTunes' customers in search of songs on free, unauthorized file-swapping networks."

"A sore point for some music executives is the fact that Apple generates much more money selling iPod players than it does as a digital music retailer, leading to complaints that Mr. Jobs is profiting more from tracks downloaded to fill the 21 million iPods sold so far than are the labels that produced the recordings," the NYT reported.

Interestingly, the report said another other main battleground in Apple's coming confrontation with the music industry will be over "interoperability" of services and devices.

"Mr. Jobs has so far refused to make the iTunes software compatible with music players from other manufacturers, and he has prevented the iPod from accepting music sold from competing services that use a Microsoft-designed music format," the report concluded. "As a result, songs purchased from Napster, for example, will not play on an iPod."

Sony BMG in particular has taken steps that may apply pressure to Mr. Jobs to make Apple's software compatible with that of other companies. The company has issued dozens of new titles - including high-profile CD's from the Dave Matthews Band and the Foo Fighters - with software to limit the number of copies that can be made from the disc. The software is compatible with Microsoft's music software, but not Apple's, and as a result music from those Sony BMG albums cannot be transferred to iPods that are hooked up to Windows-based PC's. EMI has been test-marketing similar software with a handful of titles.