“If you have something newer, I would love to see it.”

Sadly I don’t, but then the recording industry is as notorious as the movie studios when it comes to accurately reporting their costs. Unless another major label insider has written a similar article, I don’t think there’s any non-independent figures available to the public. Given your usual form, I’d guess you really want major label figures. But, please, if you do come across such figures I’d be happy to look at them and see whether my own assumptions are correct.

My main point stands, however – you cannot possibly claim that figures from an album made 17 years ago, in the pre-digital, pre-internet days have any direct bearing on the costs of an album today. Pretending that they do is disingenuous at best, especially when you don’t cite where you’re getting the figures from.

“if the AC was reading Techdirt as a whole, he would have seen those numbers come up in the previous discussion”

If the AC is like me in any way, he may only read the site sporadically. For example, I only tend to log in here while I’m at work during quiet periods. Unfortunately, the site is set up in a way that doesn’t provide an easy way to see new posts in a discussion without finding the article and scrolling down to where you left off. Therefore, it’s easy to miss parts of some discussions.

It might be a pain, but if your entire argument depends on a previous thread, it’s better to repeat the information or link back to it, rather than assuming that every reader will have read the previous discussion.

“My original post does not suggest that a single song costs 250,000.”

You wrote 2 sentences, one after the other. The first said “songs”, the second said “studio recording”. A song can be a studio recording. The reasonable assumption, without any further clues to your intent, is to assume that you were referring to songs in both sentences.

It’s unfortunate that your words were misunderstood, but the problem was your wording and not an attempt to attack or misrepresent you.

“So you are saying that only Mike and this AC can run with half truths and dumb theories?”

You’re free to refute any of their claims, citing good reasons and evidence of why they are wrong. You don’t do this, and instead make wild and easily disproved claims (e.g. your claims last week about WEP being secure) or defend even the silliest corporate actions. Hell, your very identity here is as a contrarian to everything Mike says, often regardless of whether he’s correct.