danmelnick

This is part of the problem for sure, but it's also how the revenue is split between back catalog vs new music.

In the physical media era, when you bought a record/CD you owned it forever and your marginal cost of listening to a song approached zero over time. Most dollars went to new music.

Now, it's close to a 75/25 split of dollars going to back catalog vs new music on streaming services.

If you're a new musician, you're not competing against new music, you're competing against the entire history of recorded music. You're fighting for a piece of a pie that the Beatles are still taking a chunk of.

And the labels are a part of the problem there, they made the deals with the streaming services that allows back catalog to dominate.

My understanding is that bubbles form when money is cheap and is chasing returns. If interest rates went up and/or the money supply was dampened and people had incentive to not chase returns in markets like tech, a bubble would be less likely to form.

That said, the psychology of bubbles is difficult to stop once it gains momentum.

The problem is that an entity like the fed doesn't have better information than the markets about appropriate asset pricing, so attempts to dampen bubbles might turn out to be premature or ill advised.

That's my $.02, I'm not a trained economist, just an armchair observer.

The problem with the Euro is that it forces a central monetary policy but each country is mostly on its own to set its own fiscal policy.

Here's the thing about those recruiters.

Let's say they get a budget of $80/hour for the project. Their goal is to sell it to you for as little as possible so they can take the difference. So they're always lying to you about the customer's budget, because in truth it's about them maximizing their profit.

I once had a recruiter offer me $25/hour. I laughed at them and told them to not call me back unless they could do $60, which at the time was my rate. They called back about 15 minutes later and said the client had increased the budget and they could do $60.

This is the way I've approached the issue for sometime, and the analogy I always use with clients to explain the additional cost is one of translation. Most browsers speak english, or some basic dialect of english. I can deal with those dialects. IE6 speaks Chinese. It costs more money to translate the site into Chinese. People seem to understand that analogy.

I wonder if they actually licensed that music for use in that video? If my ear is correct it's The Bad Plus. I hope they did license it.

Well, they both have their strengths and weaknesses obviously. One thing I'd say in Android's favor is that if you make a really kick-ass game, you'll be a big fish in a small(er) pond. I think with the iPhone there's a higher risk/reward, but with Android you have a chance to make a really big splash.