When you run one of the largest music labels in the world and your kids still pirate music, it must be a little embarrassing to show up at the RIAA offices and spend days in smoky conference rooms plotting the legal downfall of file-swappers. We imagine lots of awkward stares and desperate conversations beginning with, "So..." But somehow, Warner Music CEO Edgar Bronfman made it work. Perhaps he just has a high threshold for embarrassment?

Certainly he wasn't ashamed to show up in Macau this week to deliver a keynote (PDF) at the GSMA Mobile Asia Congress in which he licked the sneakers of Steve Jobs. "You need to look no further than Apple's iPhone to see how fast brilliantly written software presented on a beautifully designed device with a spectacular user interface will throw all the accepted notions about pricing, billing platforms and brand loyalty right out the window." Talk about laying it on with a trowel.

How far we've come from the Jobs/Bronfman spat of 2005 over whether the record industry was "greedy." Bronfman now emits whole paragraphs that sound like they were drafted in a Cupertino PR office. "We want Apple and Google and you name it to succeed as well," he said. He talked up iTunes. He praised "Apple's cooperation" and said that the company made "discovering, accessing, and purchasing" Warner products "seamless and intuitive."

Perhaps Bronfman really does think that iTunes is the hottest thing since the 8-track, but the point of the speech was not (as some commentators have it) to proclaim himself an Apple fanboy, but to sell music on mobile phones. Trashing one of the hottest mobiles on the planet isn't a good way to do that.

A new horizon for mobile music?

Bronfman called on the mobile phone industry to wake up from its "boring, banal, and basic" music offerings, instead offer true single-click buying of music and innovative new services like "push tones" (don't ask; it's not really that innovative). Saying that the music industry's world was "rocked" because the labels "moved at a glacial pace" and "inadvertently went to war with consumers," he encouraged phone operators not to make the same mistakes.

"We used to fool ourselves," Bronfman added. "We used to think our content was perfect just exactly as it was. We expected our business would remain blissfully unaffected even as the world of interactivity, constant connection and file sharing was exploding. And of course we were wrong."

This isn't merely a cautionary tale that Bronfman is spreading out of a desire to do public service. Instead, he wants device makers to wake up and start making his product easier to buy. Pointing out that music-enabled mobiles are eclipsing dedicated music players in sales, Bronfman talked up the potential for handset operators, network operators, and content providers to each make boatloads of cash by giving customers what they want.

The endgame is higher "data usage, ARPU [average revenue per user] and customer loyalty."

What Bronfman has realized is that iTunes, despite its reach, isn't worth a war over. The biggest market potential comes from the billions of phone owners who will never be iTunes subscribers, and Warner seems more interested now in turning the handset into a huge new market for Warner tunes than it does in fighting battles over variable iTunes pricing.

Lowering prices would be a good way to encourage more sales, since I'm not aware of any mobile users who like getting the shaft just so that they can buy a song from a handset instead of PC. Sadly, that did not appear to be in the offing.