the economy, stupid

[jfb]

The Times Business section was unusually not dull this Sunday.

Chrysler's new CEO comes from a labor family, which he and the article's author see as a nice metaphor for increased cooperation between unions and management. It's not clear whether any union leaders other than his parents appreciate the poetry of it.

As the economy becomes less bad, Kerry has to shift tactics. Now that "the odds are rising that the president may squeak through with as many jobs at the end of his term as at the start, or almost as many"--a resounding endorsement I'd love to see in a Bush campaign ad--he can't simply point at the recession and say Bush is a failure. An article looks at some of the other economic and domestic issues Kerry is focusing on, like health insurance.

Comcast wants to provide video-on-demand interviews with Bush and Kerry. Also, Bono has joined a venture capital firm.

Randall Stross wants Apple to offer lossless compression for downloaded music. He's right that consumer choice is, in principle, good, and that iTunes MP3s sound worse than CDs, but he barely mentions the main reason music files are compressed: So you can have lots of them.

In other business news, my sister pointed out that everyone in our immediate family is currently "between jobs", one way or another--except Mom, who is simply retired.

Comments

[morganology.livejournal.com]

We prefer "underemployed".

[artname.livejournal.com]

I prefer "differently ambitious" myself ..

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Huh, I didn't realize iTunes was 128kbps only. Although bitrate is not an absolute measure of quality—different encoders can vary pretty widely, and even 192 can sound pretty bad with a sloppy encoding.

Anyway, the main reason music files are compressed is turning out to be bandwidth constraints. Storage keeps getting cheaper, but bandwidth seems to be more or less stuck where it was five years ago. (Remember the fiber optic hype? Good times.)

I was surprised but happy to read the RealNetworks guy say this:

Far better, he argued, to abandon the notion of "owning" songs, because the concept condemns users to endless purchases. "How many times do you want to own your music?" he asked. "I own my music as eight-tracks, I own my music as albums, I own my music as cassettes, I own my music as CD's."

But I should have known better—he's against "owning" media (or should I say "'owning'"?), but he's fine with "owning" songs:

With a subscription service like RealRhapsody, one saves personal tastes in the form of playlists that replace actual music collections, providing access to favorites no matter what storage format comes out "in the next 5 or 10 or 20 years," Mr. Wolpert said.

Baby steps, I guess; that is an improvement over paying per copy, but it makes me uncomfortable for different reasons (the word "subscription" being not the least of them, implying that your "ownership" can expire).

[jfb.livejournal.com]

Yeah, storage keeps getting cheaper, but I'd still hate to be keeping WAV files on my iPod. I take his point that in the future we'll all be playing music on our home theater system from our quantum microdot drives, I just found that it didn't speak to me much as a consumer today.

On the other hand, I've never bought anything from iTunes, either--if I want to own music, I buy the CD and get all the bits. And the liner notes.

My answer to "How many times do you want to own your music" is "Once, and I want to really own it." Unfortunately that's in direct opposition to "How many times do labels want you to buy their music?"