In 2000, the average suggested list price of a CD was $14.02, according to the Recording Industry Association of American (RIAA). The CD itself costs about 32 cents in a large production run, according to Michael Pardo, V.P. of sales for CD duplicator Greenwood Solutions. Add packaging and the price goes to 54 cents. Add the cut for a new artist, somewhere between 10 and 50 cents, and your cost nears a buck. Add $28 million to cancel your estimated $80 to $100 million contract with Mariah Carey, as EMI recently did, and adjust your costs accordingly.
Thinking about the new economy I was discussing with my wife something related to all this while shopping at a super market this morning. We were reading various products ingredients on their labels, trying to understand which are the best, or at least which ones don't pose some kind of threat to our health. While trying to figure out what was something written on a shampoo bottle, I said "I would like to have google available now". The new economy brought this to us: freedom to access information, from anywhere, from anybody. To me this is a particularly important issue, especially at a time when here in Italy the three main private TV network are controlled by the Prime Mininster, and the three other main public networks are controlled... uh... by the Prima Mininster. I'm not saying that there's currently lack of freedom in Italy, but having access to the web and thus to ideas and opinion from people allover the world, makes me feel definitely more comfortable. But access to information does not mean culture. What need to be done (and I'm afraid is not the top priority now among governments of most Western countries) is to create the cultural bases for the new generations. Having access to this world of information will do no good unless we'll provide the tools to decode and understand this huge amount of data that the new economy helping us to create. Otherwise we, as individuals, will loose. [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]
Insatiable SVG. If you think of SVG as a toy technology to draw nice pictures, wake up! SVG is invading your cell phone and this "graphical XML" might wipe out "text XML" (such as XHTML and XSL-FO), just as graphical user interfaces have wiped out text-based user interfaces. [xmlhack]
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