Status and music

4 Comments

Just a quick posting to mention two entirely unrelated pieces of good news:

  • Mary Anne passed her oral exam! Yay! (Not, mind you, that anyone had any serious doubts that she would.) Next on the agenda: rest, followed by written exam next weekend.
  • Apple has a new music download system, whereby you pay $1 per song (less than you'd pay to get most songs on a CD, though of course more than you'd pay to get a free pirated copy online) to get legitimate copies of any of 200,000 songs in their catalog, all available through an easy interface built into the new version of iTunes. Also, there's a new slim 30GB iPod available. I've been waiting for the iPod to turn into something more like a PDA, but maybe it's time to stop waiting. Won't be trying the music service 'til I get home and have broadband access again, but it looks cool.

The unfortunate (also unrelated) news is that my body has learned a new trick: sleeping in 1-hour increments, even when heavily dosed with NyQuil. Needless to say, this approach is insufficient to provide proper rest to a Jed. I'm crossing my fingers (until I fall asleep anyway) in hope that I can unlearn this bad habit soon.

4 Responses to “Status and music”

  1. heather w

    my question, which i have not yet bothered to try to answer for myself, is how is that $1 distributed among apple, record labels, and artists? In my dreams it’s something like 5-10-85, respectively, but I imagine it’s closer to 24.5 – 74.5 – 1.

    what’s the author cut at fictionwise and the like?

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  2. Jenn Reese

    I’m just tremendously bummed that it’s not available for us PC users yet. Phooey. I’d love to buy my music that way. I’ve pushed the free Amazon downloads to the limit at this point.

    And I love my 20GB iPod, even though it’s already out-of-date. 🙂

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  3. Tobias Buckell

    Yeah, I’ve already purchased 28 songs. This could get addictive.

    Loving it.

    Gonna buy the Rob Zombie CDs when I get paid Friday.

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  4. Jed

    Good question, Heather. It was pointed out in the Slashdot discussion that various middlepersons aren’t necessary for this transaction (CD reproduction, booklet reproduction, putting CDs into cases, CD transportation, CD warehousing, music store, etc), so I’m hoping that the artist gets a bigger cut as a result. But I admit that I have no actual data about this.

    I also have no data about Fictionwise. For authors who’ve made deals directly with FW, I get the impression that the author gets a pretty good deal. On the other hand, a lot of FW’s recent books have been sold at hardcover prices; I’m guessing (with no actual data, so talking through my hat) that those prices were negotiated by publishing companies, and that authors don’t get any more from those than they would from the equivalent hardcover sale.

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