RIAA keeps wholesale prices secret

It's long been rumored that iTunes' profit margins are razor thin, but it's never been revealed exactly how much Apple takes home from each track sold at the iTunes store. Ars Technica has a post up discussing a new lawsuit that is attempting to get the RIAA to reveal their wholesale pricing, which is generally believed to be about seventy cents per track. Of particular interest in this article is the discussion of clauses in distribution contracts that guarantee the best possible rates to the record industry for track sales. I've often heard that the secret to iTunes' success is volume, volume, volume, but here's more evidence that it isn't the quantity of iTunes sales but the number of iPods sold that really leads to Apple's bottom line.