filchyboy

iTunes is Bogus

While I agree with the premise that yes artists should be paid more the basic retail model is that at the retail level retailers raise the cost 100% as the basic markup.  Apple's .35 is actually .15 less than standard.  It is not the retailers obligation to ensure the vendor at the bottom of the chain is being compensated adequately.  I completely agree with the premise.  The system is fucked for artists, but, raggin on iTunes in this fashion just makes the critic sound ignorant.  It is entirely beside the point as far as iTunes is designed whether that .64 goes to a record label or the artist but Apple is certainly not going to, and shouldn't, ensure artists get adequate compensation by giving up any more points.  Those points are the price of doing business and marketing in the retail sphere.  Actual profit will of course be much smaller after overhead is accounted for. Downhillbattle also seems to find meaning in the downward trend of iTunes sales per day.  I do no know anything about Apple's business model with iTunes.  But given the figures on the website I reckon Apple's .35 per song comes out to roughly $3,150,000.00 in gross sales.  Once again I do not know anythng at all about Apple's costs for this convenient service but if my business were grossing $1,050,000.00 per month I'd consider it a success.  But that's just me.

Posting Troubles

It's rather amusing that over the last year or so my perfectionism, my desire for a seamless and easy to use way to manage the various channels in which I want to publish, has proven to be so much of my undoing. It seems as though at every turn I am thwarted by some bug, glitch, or incompatibility. I want ownership of my words in way that 3rd party platforms don't allow. Typepad is great as far as it goes but what happens when SixApart is bought by AOL next week and they shut down the entire system. Do I get to beg to have my words back, do I have to use the Google cache function to try and piece things back together? In some ways I continue to pay for Typepad because I don't want to lose access to all of the work I put into it. I know I know I can simply export my posts. But that holds it's own travails. For instance I found that my posting history is so extensive that I cannot find a tool which will import them seamlessly. So one of my MT installs has a batch of duped posts through out the middle time period. I spent months editing these dupes, which arose when the importing stalled over and over due to the size of the file, only to have the entire shebang ending up as part of a failed hard drive. I read recently that Nick Denton is working on just such a problem. How does one commodify the pieces and parts of blogs so that they are easily managed, moved, and edited, without getting bogged down into coding issues or incompatibility across platforms. Now sure if I had the time I could build my own system. But I have a day job. I keep myself very busy and I want to spend my time writing in english not perl on my days off. It's gotten so bad that every time some new toy or development comes along I gleefully check it out hoping it will solve my issues. But at the first sniff of a problem or glitch I simply blow it off.