Pirated by iTunes, Artist Turns to BitTorrent | TorrentFreak
Many people that i’d meet at my shows would say that they bought my music on iTunes, yet I’ve never signed any sort of agreement allowing iTunes to host my music, and I’ve certainly never seen a dime of money for my albums hosted there.
So I started investigating the numbers from the label, which led me to some shocking revelations about how little the artist and label was getting in comparison to the retailers. When I got around to asking about iTunes, the owner of Sublight Records pleaded with me to “leave it be”. Everyone else made an extraordinary effort to ignore my calls and emails.

When I finally got a hold of the digital distributor (I must note that “digital distributor” is the most pathetic job title I’ve ever heard), I was told that once the files are in the iTunes system, it literally couldn’t be removed or taken down for a year. So, either Apple has created a self-aware doomsday machine that cannot be stopped or reasoned with, or everyone involved is just enjoying the gravy train of ripping off artists like myself and using Apple’s backbone of attorneys as an intimidation factor.
(Via DMG Live News)

I hope there will be a follow-up to that story, because I would like to know what really happened. As far as I understand iTunes does not actually encode the music. That is done by the labels or digital distributors. What seems possible, given the size of the iTunes library, is that an individual or a distributor might claim rights to an album and deliver it to iTunes, where it is sold until the artist or somebody else yells fire.