An oversimplification of his position, I'm sure, but that's the impression he gives. As you say, it doesn't help that his homepage is an oil spill of inscrutable links, an assault on the senses.
Yeah, Nielsen's homepage does seem overwhelming. In fact, I think that Steve Krug's website is much more usable than Jakob Nielsen's (although it does have an advantage by having much less content).
So if someone hears a song they like, and they go online to buy it, are they going to see the lower price and immediately think, "Oh no, I like a cheap song, I must be weird."
Also, in the case of music singles, by the time you decide to buy one, you've already heard the entire song and you know that you like it, so a low price won't deter you. But in case of a movie, when it comes time to plunk down your cash at the theatre, you've only seen a 60 second trailer for a two hour movie, so seeing a low price might discourage you. How often have you asked a friend about a movie and gotten the response, "Bleh, all the best parts of the movie were in the trailer."
So on one hand you've got music singles, where you've sampled the entire product before buying, and on the other hand you've got movies, where you've sampled little or nothing before buying. I suspect that entire music albums fall somewhere in between these two extremes, but closer to the movie end than the music single end. In my pre-P2P days, I used to buy albums only having heard one or two songs on a 12 song album, which is a fairly big gamble. With this new tiered pricing, if I heard a hot single and then went to buy the album and saw that it was discounted, I might think, "Oh no, not another crappy album with two good songs and 10 songs of filler", and decide not to buy it.
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So on one hand you've got music singles, where you've sampled the entire product before buying, and on the other hand you've got movies, where you've sampled little or nothing before buying. I suspect that entire music albums fall somewhere in between these two extremes, but closer to the movie end than the music single end. In my pre-P2P days, I used to buy albums only having heard one or two songs on a 12 song album, which is a fairly big gamble. With this new tiered pricing, if I heard a hot single and then went to buy the album and saw that it was discounted, I might think, "Oh no, not another crappy album with two good songs and 10 songs of filler", and decide not to buy it.