iTunes gets TIME's nod

iTunes is TIME Magazine's Invention of the Year, and has a great summary of the basic economics at work:

Enter [Steve] Jobs. Back in April, Apple's ceo revealed that he had spent the previous year negotiating an unprecedented deal with all five major labels and thousands of independents. His iTunes software, which had previously been nothing more than a place to store and play digital music on a Mac, would become a gateway to the Music Store, where you could easily find and save music to your hard drive, CD or iPod music player�no subscription necessary, just 99� per song, or $9.99 for an album. Competitors tried to match that price but couldn't come up with a service as free of restrictions. They said Jobs had been given a sweet deal by the labels because Apple, with its miniscule share of the computer market, was never going to be a real distribution threat. "The Mac world is a walled garden," said BuyMusic.com vice president Liz Brooks. "The PC environment is like the Wild West."

Then came iTunes for Windows, and suddenly there was a new sheriff in town. Not content with creating a music store for PC users that was a perfect clone of its Mac counterpart, including all of the 400,000 songs Apple now has the rights to resell, Jobs added a couple of cool new features, the best of which was a monthly allowance you can set up for your kids to govern their online purchases�a godsend for any parent trying to curb an offspring's downloading habit.

Jobs has one more reason not to be concerned about the competition. "The dirty little secret of all this is there's no way to make money on these stores," he says. For every 99� Apple gets from your credit card, 65� goes straight to the music label. Another quarter or so gets eaten up by distribution costs. At most, Jobs is left with a dime per track, so even $500 million in annual sales would add up to a paltry $50 million profit. Why even bother? "Because we're selling iPods," Jobs says, grinning.

That may make iTunes the most benign-looking Trojan Horse in software history. The Windows crowd can get iTunes free, and it offers almost all the same functionality as the paid versions of MusicMatch and Real One, two PC-based rivals. But iTunes is the only music application that will work with the enormously popular iPod, and it has features�like its powerful search function�that are unrivaled. "Once people are locked into using iTunes, the game's over," says Charles Wolf, an analyst at the New York City� based Needham & Co. investment bank. "They could sell an extra 2 million iPods because of this." And the margins on these devices make the Music Store's arithmetic look like child's play. Each $499 iPod returns as much as $175 in profit, Wolf says.

Note that this is the mirror image of the cell phone industry, where they give away the hardware and charge you for the service. The reason the finances work outthis way is ultimately because of the RIAA's greed - how much of that 65 cents do you think goes to the artists?

On the whole, I like iTunes, and I might even get an iPod someday. But I won't ever use the Apple Music Store, because of the simple reason that I will not use a proprietary and restricted file format such as AAC or play by the RIAA's skewed rules. The TIME article does not mention explicitly the implied fact that the Apple Music Store is largely irrelevant to the business model, amounting to nothing more than iPod marketing. ITunes is far more important - and since it works with my existing MP3 collection, it has all eth functionality I need. And that's largely going to be true of most PC users.

Is this a revolution in portable music? yes. Is it a revolution in the music industry for consumers? NO. In fact, by leaping into bed with the RIAA, Apple has taken the issue of fair use a step backwards, by giving the RIAA more control and more profits, both at the expense of the artists.

no Scouring of the Shire

Harry on AICN shares an email from Peter Jackson, discussing the editorial decision to cut Saruman out of the Return of the King. In the context of explaining why, he also answers a major point of fan speculation:

We have decided to save the Saruman sequence for the DVD. It's a great little scene. 7 mins long. Chris is wonderful, as usual. Brad is in about 6 shots. It was a film maker decision - nothing to do with the studio.

The problem is that the sequence was originally shot for The Two Towers, as it is in the book. Since The Two Towers couldn't sustain a 7 min "wrap" after Helm's Deep, we thought it would be a good idea to save it for the beginning of the Return of the King. The trouble is, when we viewed various ROTK cuts over the last few weeks, it feels like the first scenes are wrapping last year's movie, instead of starting the new one. We felt it got ROTK off to an uncertain beginning, since Saruman plays no role in the events of ROTK (we don't have the Scouring later, as the book does), yet we dwell in Isengard for quite a long time before our new story kicks off.

We reluctantly made the decision to save this sequence for the DVD. The choice was made on the basis that most people will assume that Saruman was vanquished by the Helm's Deep events, and Ent attack. We can now crack straight into setting up the narrative tension of ROTK, which features Sauron as the villian.

The Scouring of the Shire has been a subject of much debate - and for many fans (myself included) it's been hard to imagine the series ending any other way. Frodo MUST sail for Valinor at the end, and how can he get to that point without having fought evil in his own backyard? How else to put Merry and Pippin's growth in their proper context? I won't deny I am profoundly disappointed. But I trust Peter Jackson completely. And maybe we will see the Scouring yet someday.

Douglas Adams' SETI@home account still active

Looks like someone has left DNA's computer running all this time. He lives on...

Diana Moon returns

and her views have evolved in both subtle and non ways. I don't think this is the same person who raged at Tacitus and myself a few months ago. this post is the epitome of the kind of self-reflection - and unanswered questions - that the blogsphere seems to lack most of these days. Part of it reads:

How do you view the Israeli-Palestinian dispute?

Have you heard that saying, "it's right against right"? I look at it this way: "it's wrong against wrong." You've got two sort of trumped up identities, neither of which existed 60 years ago, spewing agit-prop and hate against one another, both of them on behalf of national identities that are in the long run completely untenable. And then you've got these packs of bloggers, mostly pro-Israel, but a few on the other side, totally trashing the very concept of empathy for the other side. Most of them are deeply ignorant, and I got tired of being associated with them. Two of them didn't even know that Israel doesn't have civil marriage.

No comments threads, unfortunately. An intriguing evolution of perspective - Diana used to be firmly on the Meryl Yourish side of the fence. I wonder what she'd make of my writings on the topic now.

Anyway, Moon's blog is going to be one to watch for a while....

debasing democracy

The Bush White House, irritated by pesky questions from congressional Democrats about how the administration is using taxpayer money, has developed an efficient solution: It will not entertain any more questions from opposition lawmakers.

The decision -- one that Democrats and scholars said is highly unusual -- was announced in an e-mail sent Wednesday to the staff of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees. House committee Democrats had just asked for information about how much the White House spent making and installing the "Mission Accomplished" banner for President Bush's May 1 speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln.
The director of the White House Office of Administration, Timothy A. Campen, sent an e-mail titled "congressional questions" to majority and minority staff on the House and Senate Appropriations panels. Expressing "the need to add a bit of structure to the Q&A process," he wrote: "Given the increase in the number and types of requests we are beginning to receive from the House and Senate, and in deference to the various committee chairmen and our desire to better coordinate these requests, I am asking that all requests for information and materials be coordinated through the committee chairmen and be put in writing from the committee."

The sad part is that many reasonable people who support Bush will simply nod their heads and think this is proper. Especially with the spin-attempt to make an analogy between the essential investigation into how this Administration falsified and politicized intelligence to make a public case for war, and the way in which intelligence secrecy factored into World War II. The analogy is false because in the latter case, the very existence of the intelligence was a secret - the Japanese and Germans did not even know we had broken their codes, and a public investigation into whether FDR allowed Pearl Harbor to happen would have revealed the existence of that secret. In the case of Iraq, the intellgience was widely advertised by the Administration itself - and it turned out to be lies.

This is the bottom line: the way in this policy violates the fundamental Constitutional requirements of separation of powers, checks and balances, and the very idea of a loyal opposition, is obscene. It is counter to the principle of accountable government. And it is exactly this kind of behavior that burns Bush's credibility, even if he is right on an issue (as with N. Korea, for example).

new H2G2 radio series!!!!!!!

YES!!!!!!

A six-part adaptation of Life, the Universe and Everything will be up first in the spring. This will be followed towards the end of 2004 by an eight-week serialisation combining So Long and Thanks for All the Fish with Mostly Harmless.
...
The Hitchhiker's production is set to re-unite six members of the original cast: Simon Jones, Geoffrey McGivern, Mark Wing-Davey, Susan Sheridan, Stephen Moore and announcer John Marsh. Those joining them will include William Franklyn as the voice of the Book and Richard Griffiths as Slartibartfast. The late Douglas Adams himself will appear as Agrajag (a cameo he favoured playing) thanks to recordings made for Dove Audio's unabridged book readings.

THIS IS AMAZING NEWS!!!! The original H2G2 radio series is my absolute favorite audio ever - I listen to my CDs and my mp3's of the entire 12-episode run at least once a month. I picked up the series on cassette when I was in London in 1996, and lost them in 2000 when my Jeep was stolen. My friend Murtz bought me the whole series on CD afterwards (for which I still owe him a thousand hours of indentured servitude). I've got virtually the entire thing committed to memory (would that I could reproduce the same feat with the Qur'an).

And it's INCREDIBLY significant that they got the original voice cast! Mark Wing-Davey as Zaphod and Geoffrey McGivern as Ford, Simon Jones as Arthur Dent - these people became their roles in a way that people who have only read the books simply cannot fathom.

It's a shame that Peter Jones has passed on - his voice was just as authentically The Guide - insanely long run-on sentences and all - as any of the above actors for their roles. I'm more than eager to see how Franklyn fills the role, he has large shoes.. er, larynx.. to fill.

Spring 2004!!!!!!

maybe we can hire Saddam back

via Kevin comes a breathtaking example of hubris masquerading as policy - Ralph Peters suggests a solution to combating the guerilla opposition in Iraq:

We need to have the guts to give at least one terrorist haven a stern lesson as an example to the others. Fallujah is the obvious choice.

If the populace continues to harbor our enemies and the enemies of a healthy Iraqi state, we need to impose strict martial law. Instead of lavishing more development funds on the city - bribes that aren't working - we need to cut back on electricity, ration water, restrict access to the city and organize food distribution through a ration card system. And we need to occupy the city so thickly that the inhabitants can't step out of their front doors without bumping into an American soldier.

Don't worry about alienating the already alienated. Make an example of them. Then see how the other cities respond. Such an experiment would be expensive. But strategic victories don't come cheap.
...
We're overdue to take a lesson from the Romans and the British before us and recognize the value of punitive expeditions....One key lesson we should draw about expeditionary warfare in the Age of Terror is that we need not feel obliged to rebuild every government we are forced to destroy....Exemplary punishment may be out of fashion, but it's one of the most enduringly effective tools of statecraft. Where you cannot be loved, be feared. Indeed, a classic punitive expedition may prove to be the perfect model for Syria.

Kevin rightly notes, "Short of installing a police state � and wouldn't that be ironic? � this kind of escalation by an occupying power never works. Never. " You can look to the disastrous policies of Sharon to see Exhibit A - and this is the model of occupier-occupied that Peters thinks needs to be extended to the entire Middle East?

This kind of ivory tower ahistorical power fantasy is not new coming from Peters, however. Via SDB's polemical archive of "essential" essays, is an earlier essay that Peters wrote that argues, "Stability, America's Enemy" :

At present, a portion of the armed forces of the United States is mired in stability operations that simply bide time in the hope that somehow things will come out right, while an even greater portion is focused on avenging the recent terrorist attacks against America. We may wish all of these endeavors Godspeed, yet it would be a disservice to the men and women in uniform not to ask how we have come to this pass. Self-examination in the strategic sphere has not been an American strength. Perhaps it is time to make it one.

Meanwhile, we deny causes, ignore unpleasant realities, put on our flak jackets, and hope for the best. Certainly we should not replace stability operations with "instability operations" to provoke or accelerate change beyond its local, organic pace. And we must differentiate between unpopular terrorist groups and genuine mass movements: There is a great difference between the vicious Basque terrorists of the ETA and the African National Congress that triumphed over apartheid. All dissident organizations are not equally legitimate.

But we do need to stop providing life-support to terminally ill governments, and we must be open to new, unprecedented solutions, from plebiscites that alter borders to emergent or re-emergent forms of administration in failed states, whether enlightened corporate imperialism or post-modern tribalism. If the corporation can manage more humanely than the dictator, why not give it a chance? If the tribe can govern more effectively than a thieving, oppressive government, why not let the tribe reclaim its own land?

Note that the latter essay does actually have much that is agreeable, but Peters has a tendency to simply wave his hands and assert that the chaos of instability will indeed work out for the best. He's guilty of his own accusation - and his proposal to impose martial law on Falluja certainly flies in teh face of his own thesis.