Charles on… anything that comes along

• iTunes price rise a cert - EMI boss | The Register
  

  EMI Music’s chief executive Alain Levy has said that there’s now a consensus that the price of hit songs will rise on digital download sites. Apple charges 99 cents per song on its iTunes Music Store regardless of the song’s popularity - something that the industry is keen to change.

  “There is a common understanding that we will have to come to a variable pricing structure. The issue is when. There is a case for superstars to have a higher price,” Levy told the Wall Street Journal.
  Click Here

  .. and as Kate Bush is on EMI this may begin to go a little way to explaining why her new album Aerial is still not listed on iTunes.. it’s all going to get ugly, very ugly, I think. Where’s that P2P app?

• Joel on Software on variable music and movie pricing
  

  this [varying the price between ‘old’ and ‘new’ songs and artists] is what the recording industry is telling you that they want to do on iTunes. But they don’t do it in movie theaters. Why not?

  The answer is that pricing sends a signal. People have come to believe that “you get what you pay for.” If you lowered the price of a movie, people would immediately infer from the low price that it’s a crappy movie and they wouldn’t go see it. If you had different prices for movies, the $4 movies would have a lot less customers than they get anyway. The entertainment industry has to maintain a straight face and tell you that Gigli or Battlefield Earth are every bit as valuable as Wedding Crashers or Star Wars or nobody will go see them.

  Now, the reason the music recording industry wants different prices has nothing to do with making a premium on the best songs. What they really want is a system they can manipulate to send signals about what songs are worth, and thus what songs you should buy. I assure you that when really bad songs come out, as long as they’re new and the recording industry wants to promote those songs, they’ll charge the full $2.49 or whatever it is to send a fake signal that the songs are better than they really are. It’s the same reason we’ve had to put up with crappy radio for the last few decades: the music industry promotes what they want to promote, whether it’s good or bad, and the main reason they want to promote something is because that’s a bargaining chip they can use in their negotiations with artists. [my emphasis]

  EasyCinema has I think tried variable pricing on films in the UK. However, it’s struggled to get first-run films, though that’s to do with distribution. Anyone been to one?
  But this is a killer argument from Joel Spolsky about what’s really behind the scheming by the record biz. Whereas Apple, he points out, wants to control the record companies by getting to choose who features on the front page of the iTunes “Music” Store.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Is everyone going to buy last night's Apple shares back now? (10 March 2005; score: 71.55%)
• Sony completely loses the plot with "Network Walkman" (4 August 2004; score: 49.17%)
• That's funny, I thought the answer was 'an iPod' or 'Robosapien' (7 December 2004; score: 44.04%)

Woe unto the world. Good Morning Silicon Valley’s blog, which has some of the funniest headlines above the stories of the dumbest tech execs - for example, one of their tales about Sony’s rootkit messups was headline “And we would have got away with it if it hadn’t been for you meddling kids” - has moved from a full feed to a partial feed.

Agh. I hate partial feeds. I don’t follow them, for the main part. After all, what does a partial post in my newsreader tell me? That the page has updated, and that it might be worth going over there, but on the other hand, who knows? Not many people are good enough at writing to the constraints of the few hundred characters that you feel compelled to go to the page, rather than move on to the next (full?) feed in your aggregator. You don’t get told if the article is enormously long (in the blog, it’s not).

Why have they done this? At best it only halves the amount of data they’re putting out, and it’s only TEXT for God’s sake. It ruins the whole experience. I’ve created a folder in NetNewsWire called “partial feeds” for those who don’t deign to let me read what they’re blogging. One of my first decisions on setting up this blog was to make it full-feed. (It’s an option on Wordpress.)

Yes, I know. (1) They want people to come and see the adverts. Well, why not put the ads into the RSS feed? (2) The Guardian does partial feeds. Not much I can do about that at present.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Microsoft insider who hates it, Tivo hates customers, and how conscious are cockroaches? (17 September 2005; score: 43.71%)
• Must get more RSS feeds... must get more.. (17 January 2006; score: 38.01%)
• CSS twiddle means more readable in XP? (11 August 2005; score: 36.02%)

The Independent today has a special digital photography supplement, for which I’ve written a few things, including a consideration of how the analogue/digital issue is moving.

The old expectation that more megapixels would solve your problems is gradually fading; once you get beyond four megapixels, your picture is not going to improve, unless you’re making posters. So digital cameras with replaceable lenses, and particularly programmable shutters (which let you adjustthe depth of focus and exposure time) will become much cheaper, and so more common.

The phone companies aren’t going to stand still either; though their purpose is not to give us the best possible cameras. It is to encourage us to upload our phone photos directly to online sharing sites, because that is a data transfer (which earns the phone network operator money). People also like the idea of sharing photos, and browsing them on phones (which more of the photo sharing sites are enabling).

It’s a world that would have seemed unimaginable only a few years ago. But it’s coming..

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Ian Hobson succumbs to the lure of "and what's more..." (28 July 2005; score: 33.31%)
• Netimperative: what's wrong with government telling us about technology (12 February 2005; score: 32.27%)
• That's funny, I thought the answer was 'an iPod' or 'Robosapien' (7 December 2004; score: 30.81%)

Updated: OK, as everyone has commented, the reviews are there. Clearly some sort of database glitch. It just happened long enough for a bunch of writers to notice it and get a bit annoyed.

I’ll leave what was up, but struck out, since it’s all completely wrong, and Amazon hasn’t done anything bad. Hope that’s clear.

Where have all the user-contributed reviews for books gone on Amazon UK?

They used to exist; I know, I did one (for Louise Wener’s “The Big Blind” since you ask).

Now however you go there and there’s just a load of rubbish from newspapers and magazines.

Has Amazon gotten sensitive about the idea that some authors (no names, since I’ve no idea who) might comment on their own books? But that was demonstrated as possible five years ago by Robert Blincoe - see his demonstration at The Register.

If it’s truly taken Amazon UK five years to get round to dealing with this, then there’s a couple of things to say.

1) You’ve really annoyed a lot of authors, who liked having punters’ comments on their books. Yes, really. They don’t want the anodyne crap spouted from papers and magazines (”Fabulous!”"Mimsy borogroves!”"Like a kettle with a spout!”), they want to be in touch with their readers.

2) It would be nice if you have some sort of explanation. As it is, Amazon UK’s press releases for 2005 has no mention of this move.

These days, one can say “Just look what happened to Sony..” to companies which try to do things by stealth and annoy folk. Come on, Amazon, cough to it. Then put them all back.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Harry Potter and the pointless reviews (fear not, no spoilers here) (21 July 2007; score: 82.82%)
• I'll just buy this... used library book via Amazon.. uh? (25 May 2005; score: 74.58%)
• How do I use the Amazon API to get sales rank? (9 June 2005; score: 64.65%)