The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week

Giving Away the Music Store

Let's test your business acumen. Say you're an enormous international music company whose very existence is threatened by free-music downloaders.

Do you: 1) Call free downloaders some choice names?
2) Do what comes natural to any red-blooded American and threaten to sue them into oblivion?
3) Just cover your eyes in the hope that the oncoming train doesn't schmear you onto the tracks?

Well, if you are Universal, you attempt something a touch less effective than any of these three. Specifically, to win the war against free music, you conspire with Nokia(NOK Quote) to give away music over cell phones. That's right: you fight free with free.

The music will be offered for 12 months, scientifically proven to be the precise moment amount of time after which listeners get sick of a song and never want to hear it again.

It's becoming quite the tact in modern business. Between newspapers giving away their work for free online and Universal conditioning customers to pay a grand total of -- oh, right, about zero dollars and zero cents for their music, free has become the new charge.

Said a Nokia executive: "The financial barrier to try new music is completely removed. It fundamentally changes a lot of business logic in the music industry." Fundamental change is a kind way to put it this shift in business logic. To say logic has been splattered along the track might be somewhat more to the point.

Dumb-O-Meter Score: 95. "We are in talks with all the major labels," said a Nokia spokesman. "The response from the labels has been very, very positive." After all: once one company shows the way, who can possibly resist giving away the store for free?