None-Too-Great Hits

What's Wrong with the Gaming Industry?

marshal law ---> martial law

Apple's iPhone vs. RIM's BlackBerry: Who Wins on Comparison?

I regularly switch between English and Japanese virtual keyboards on my iPhone, and could also add to the menu as many other languages as I wished, simply by clicking on the appropriate check-boxes.

Is It Game Over for the Gaming Industry?

I think when people read a question headline like yours, they are expecting a YES answer and some reasons why. I know I was.

Apple to Buy Lala?

My album is listed on iTunes and on LaLa too. I must say that I'd prefer people to buy it from iTunes where I would receive 70 cents of each song's purchase price, rather than LaLa, where I would receive a penny, maybe. The same goes for Rhapsody, Napster, and all the others. Amazon is the second-best, but even Amazon gives their discount at the musician's expense, not the retailer's.

Shades of the bad old days, where the musicians regularly got shafted by the record companies. Deja vu all over again.

Does Steve Jobs Deserve Fortune's "CEO of the Decade" Award?

I too have often wondered how the Stanford officials on the podium felt when Steve mentioned that he had never graduated from college himself. Yesterday I was looking a CNN/Fortune's article on the top 40 execs under the age of 40, and a good portion of them are only high school graduates with perhaps some college.

The Music Industry’s New Extortion Scheme

Unless they pay every single independent musician his or her accurately proportionate share of the revenues, this proposal would make the established stars even richer at the expense of the small fry like me. Either I would become nothing more than a rounding error in Paul McCartney's favor, or I would get royalty checks not worth cashing. In reality, of course, the effect would be permanently deferred royalties.

The Evolution of Terrestrial Radio

I appreciate the fact that J P responds to his critics with respect.

The Radio and Recording Industries' Unnecessary Roughness

An outstanding article. I will read it again a couple more times over the next few days. For now, however, I would like to challenge the statement: "A hit song clearly should garner a higher price than a secondary track on the same album, and in any other business those items would be seen as premium offerings commanding a higher price point."

This is not clear to me, on two grounds:

First, one mans meat is another man's poison: listeners' tastes differ, and if somebody else finds value in a song that I deplore, who is to say which of us should be paying the premium?

And second, in the spirit of the proverb "promiscuity is its own reward," a hit song at the same price as a non-hit reaps the value of its own success simply by selling more copies, without the buyer being forced to pay a premium for it, or without the seller of the less-popular song being forced to denigrate its value.

It's unfortunate if "concept albums" get short-shrift in the new economy, but the days of albums loaded with second-rate songs coattailing on a hit are over, thanks to the pay-per-song model and uniform pricing. Steve is right.

DISCLOSURE: I myself have a home-made album on iTunes that isn't selling diddley-squat. If you check it out, you might say "rightly so" -- or you might not.

Apple's Asian Production: Macs Up, iPods Down, iPhone Volatile

The question here is whether a Mac is really a "commodity" in the same sense that a Windows computer is. Years ago, when Apple succumbed to the conventional wisdom demanding them to lease out the OS to other companies, the immediate result was competition cutting into Apple's profit margin. Luckily for Apple, Steve came back had the sense to buy Power Computing out before the toothpaste was irrevocably out of the tube. This action "de-commoditized" the Mac OS again and saved Apple's bacon.

Amazon Announces Plans for International DRM-free Music Downloads

minor correction: I should have deleted "pricing and" from the Amazon description.

Amazon Announces Plans for International DRM-free Music Downloads

A million artists on iTunes and Amazon, but it's the same few who sell the bulk. I've had my independent album on iTunes for over a year, but so far it has sold only one copy -- to a friend! Ouch. iTunes doesn't routinely list ALL new releases, only some of them, and there's no apparently no way to know how those choices are made. I hope Amazon will be fairer than that. On the other hand, iTunes prices all albums the same and pays the artists at the same rate, whereas Amazon has a four-tier pricing and payment scheme. Three guesses as to which artists will be on which tiers. As a buyer, you may be rooting for Amazon, but as a seller, I'm rooting for iTunes.

MTV, RealNetworks to Form JV to Challenge Apple iTunes

From the viewpoint of an artist on both iTunes and Rhapsody, I'd be a lot happier to see this JV succeed if they paid anything near what Apple pays. As it stands, though, I'm rooting for Apple to wipe them out for once and for all.

Jim Swan's "None-Too-Great Hits" now on iTunes.