Jello wrote:

You sound awfully upset about such great news :)

If you think this is great news, you are doing it wrong.

Did you read the part about the 30% price hike on the songs that most people buy the most?

Under the earlier deal with EMI, each buyer could decide whether to pay more (30% more) to have Apple "leave out" the DRM. Now they have determined that it's better for everyone if buyers aren't burdened with that confusing decision. Instead, everyone will (usually) pay the higher price.

The market analysts that blurbed for this article pretend to be hopeful about the reduction in price for the neglected back-catalog items. This is a charade; Apple and/or the labels get to set the thresholds that define the boundaries between the 0.69, 0.99 and 1.29 categories.

Steve Jobs may be underweight, but he knows how to run a business. This new agreement is a margin-positive change for Apple. In other words, under the new plan, customers will be paying more for less total product.

Brad Stone was inclined to put a positive spin on this, writing that "the majority of songs will drop to 69 cents beginning in April." By "majority" he means the bulk of crap that no one wants any more, if anyone ever wanted it at all.

See Magician's Choice:

In a typical example of the Magician's Choice, the magician will ask a spectator to make an apparently free choice among several items. No matter what choices the spectator makes, the magician ends up with the item which he wanted the spectator to choose.

When Chris Anderson talks about the long tail, there's a reason why he focuses on Rhapsody and not iTunes. People who want to rummage around in the "long tail" (i.e., back catalog) are more likely to choose a subscription service.

In 2006, according to Anderson, the top 100 artists represented ~35% of sales volume at iTunes. The definition of the $1.29 category is probably more like the top 5,000 tracks, which might encompass 60-75% of the sales volume. Then you have 20-30% of volume at the $0.99 price point, and just 5-10% of volume in the $0.69 category. Depending upon how much the price hike drives down unit sales, they might define the $0.99 bin somewhat more expansively. But don't expect anything in the Billboard 100 to be in the $0.69 bin.

Real demand has been falling sharply for years now, whether you look at units sold or minutes listened. Raising (most) prices by 30% in the face of the weakest consumer confidence in the history of recorded music might not be the end of the world, but it certainly isn't Great News. It isn't even Good News.

RE: Apple Drops Anticopying Measures in iTunes

Last month, the music industry pulled out its stun guns, aka PR flacks, to bring you the following breaking news:

In a stunning turn of events, the US music industry has ceased its long-time litigation strategy of suing individual P2P file-swappers.

Earlier today, Apple briefly summoned the world's attention to bring you the following incredible (!!!) news flash:

Apple said it would begin selling song downloads from all four major music companies without the anticopying measures that have been part of its iTunes store since it opened in 2003. It will also move away from its insistence on pricing songs at 99 cents.

In other words, Apple's software engineers are so distraught over Steve Jobs' failing health that they have resorted to spinning the deletion of annoying source code as a major product innovation.

Does this sound familiar? Let John Markoff take you back:

Long assailed within the computer industry for routinely adding too many features to its software programs, Microsoft will tacitly acknowledge that criticism today when it starts a Web marketing campaign for its new Office XP software suite that ridicules its notorious Office help system.

The Clippy campaign, which will cost about $500,000, also includes a Web-site-based computer game in which irate users, many of whom have long found the paper clip program annoying to the point of distraction, will finally be able to retaliate by shooting virtual staples, tacks and rubber bands at the animated Clippy figure.

The story behind the story, of course, is that the "music industry" -- by which I mean the cartel engaged in organized trafficking in an artificially scarce form of antique "performance capture" -- is an industry in decline, and the major players are desperate to stanch the flow of attention to other "new" (and more participatory) media. Regardless of these late-stage efforts, the decline, which is both inevitable and inexorable, may be viewed as a leading indicator of a broader, long-term phase shift in celebrity culture.

From the archive:

The trick is to make people think that a certain paradigm is inevitable, and they had better give in.

Also:

Someone from the future, I’m sure, will marvel at our blindness and at the hole we have driven ourselves into, for we are completely committed to an unsustainable technology.

In this case, what's unsustainable is not just the artificial scarcity of individual captured performances, but rather of the underlying capture technology, not to mention the performance itself.

Finally:

But for everyone, surely, ... this is the lesson: never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never -- in nothing, great or small, large or petty -- never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. We stood all alone a year ago, and to many countries it seemed that our account was closed, we were finished. All this tradition of ours, our songs, our School history, this part of the history of this country, were gone and finished and liquidated.

Very different is the mood today.

Apple Drops Anticopying Measures in iTunes

Never has one generation spent so much of its children's wealth in such a short period of time with so little to show for it.

Get real or go home.

The greenest thing you can do in your kitchen is not tear it up and put in a new one.

The average Afghan spends one-fifth of his income on bribes.

Financial progress is about learning to deal with strangers in more complex ways.

It's payback time and the mood could get very ugly. Americans, to put it bluntly, have been conned.

The median household earned $48,201 in 2006, down from $49,244 in 1999, according to the US Census Bureau. It now looks as if a full decade may pass before most Americans receive a raise.

In our unending search for panaceas, we believe that happiness and "success" -- which, loosely translated, means money -- are the things to strive for. People are constantly surprised that, even though they have acquired material things, discontent still gnaws.

"Maybe this isn't the right heartless monolithic corporation for you."

"I drink your milkshake! I drink it up!"

Now you can be the protagonist of the petroleum era: explore and drill around the world, corrupt politicians, stop alternative energies and increase the oil addiction. Be sure to have fun before the resources begin to deplete.

The meritocracy wasn't supposed to work this way.

Today I write not to gloat. Instead, I am writing to say goodbye.

DIY Yahoo! Resignation Letter

Erykah Badu, on Making It

Americans commuting patterns are changing fundamentally. Similar shifts in the way we work can't be far behind.

Work and Money | Another Noteworthy Year

Paul Graham just finished Outliers and figured he could turn it into a story about Y Combinator.

Let's think about what credentials are for. What they are, functionally, is a way of predicting performance. If you could measure actual performance, you wouldn't need them.

Daniel Lemire:

Paul writes good essays, but they are thin on research.

Recently:

Although merit varies widely in many fields, only a few have developed effective methods of performance evaluation.

Malcom Gladwell:

We should be lowering our standards, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don’t track with what we care about.

From the archive:

The Artemis archetype represents a capacity for resisting the fall into 'Organization Man' or the 'Organizational Society', which uses patterns of rewards, sanctions and other inducements to achieve social conformity. Symbolic management again represents an important ideological tool in the desire to inculcate images for social compliance and the internalization of corporate values and goals. The Artemis archetype, therefore, is important in the contemporary era for preserving individual integrity and difference.

From The Organization Man:

An ideal of individualism which denies the obligations of man to others is manifestly impossible in a society such as ours, and it is a credit to our wisdom that while we preached it, we never fully practiced it.

But in searching for that elusive middle of the road, we have gone very far afield, and in our attention to making organization work we have come close to deifying it. We are describing its defects as virtues and denying that there is--or should be--a conflict between the individual and organization. This denial is bad for the organization. It is worse for the individual. What it does, in soothing him, is to rob him of the intellectual armor he so badly needs. For the more power organization has over him, the more he needs to recognize the area where he must assert himself against it. And this, almost because we have made organization life so equable, has become excruciatingly difficult.

After Credentials

Decius wrote:

Here is the definition of "mid-career:"

Full-time employees with 10 or more years of experience in their career or field who are Bachelors graduates.

For the graduates in this data set, the typical (median) mid-career employee is 42 years old and has 15.5 years of experience.

I get the impression that in general, there is a stronger correlation between age and salary than there is between merit and salary.

Could you expand on this impression? I gather you're saying that most of the 10th percentile mid-career people are the people who are only 10 years out of school, and the 90th percentile of "mid-career" people is mostly the ones who are a few years away from retirement.

When I look at the mid-career "salary spread", which I define as "Mid-Career 90th Percentile Salary" - "Mid-Career 10th Percentile Salary" for each major, I find that salary spread is always greater than "early gain", which I define as "Mid-Career Median Salary" - "Starting Median Salary". But it varies widely from one major to another.

This data suggests that age and merit may be weighted differently in each major/field. In music, for example, the median early gain is only $19,100, whereas the salary spread is $107,300. In computer engineering, the early gain is $43,600 and the salary spread is $95,900.

I found an interesting result when I sorted the list of majors according to the ratio between "mid-career" salary spread and early gain. At the top of the list, with the largest ratios, are music (5.6), drama (5.5), hospitality & tourism (4.5), and education (4.25). At the bottom of the list, with the lowest ratios, are computer engineering (2.2), aerospace engineering (2.3), civil engineering (2.3), electrical engineering (2.3), and computer science (2.4). The majors with the highest mid-career median salaries have the lowest ratios.

Although major-dependent variations in career duration could also be a factor, it seems that merit has a much bigger effect on the salaries of musicians and actors than it does on the salaries of engineers.

Seeing that, one might argue that merit naturally varies more widely in the performing arts, and thus the greater influence on salary is warranted. Of course, it's also possible that although merit varies widely in many fields, only a few have developed effective methods of performance evaluation.

RE: Salary Increase By Major | WSJ

Dow 4,000. Food shortages. A bubble in Treasury notes.

Fortune spoke to eight of the market's sharpest thinkers and what they had to say about the future is frightening.

Nouriel Roubini:

Things are going to be awful for everyday people.

Meredith Whitney:

I think the overall economy will be worse than people expect.

Robert Schiller:

Some people who are so inclined might go more into the market here because there's a real chance it will go up a lot. But that's very risky. It could easily fall by half again.

Jim Rogers:

I cannot imagine why anybody would give money to the U.S. government for 30 years for less than a 4% yield. I certainly wouldn't. There are going to be gigantic amounts of bonds coming to the market, and inflation will be coming back.

Bill Gross:

Twelve months of the Obama Nation will not be sufficient to heal the damage of a half-century's excessive leverage.

Sheila Bair:

We need to return to the culture of thrift that my mother and her generation learned the hard way through years of hardship and deprivation.

8 Really, Really Scary Economic Predictions

Paul Graham:

It's natural for organizations to learn from mistakes. The problem is, people who propose new checks almost never consider that the check itself has a cost.

From the archive:

If at first you don't succeed, at least learn from your mistakes.

The Other Half of "Artists Ship"

48 percent of dot-com companies founded since 1996 were still around in late 2004.

Mr. McFaul checks in with his psychic when he is stumped for answers about where his business, and his competition, might be headed.

“This is something that could work, though it will be tedious and expensive,” he said.

I have wondered about this for years, and still do not quite have an answer.

What is it, exactly, that drives us to seek these things again and again?

Mr. Bruckermann's cut was more than $150 million. He left the company to grow oranges on his Spanish estate.

Today:

The Bush administration is examining a range of options for providing emergency financial help to spur a merger between General Motors and Chrysler, according to government officials.

Over the past year:

Every now and then I meet someone in Manhattan who has never driven a car. I used to wonder at such people, but more and more I wonder at myself.

Last campaign season:

People used to complain that selling a president was like selling a bar of soap. But when you buy soap, at least you get the soap.

Earlier this month:

GM said in a statement Friday that bankruptcy protection was "not an option."

Last week:

One of the biggest boosters of the American auto industry said Tuesday that he was bailing out of his large stake in the Ford Motor Company — a stinging no-confidence vote that raised the anxiety level in this city over the deepening troubles of the Big Three car companies.

White House Explores Aid for Auto Deal