Heartbeat... slowing... Vision... fading... Must... have... drama... Honestly, we're not sure how many more slow news days we can take. Generally speaking, we're a gentle and peace-loving group down here at the AtAT compound, but for cryin' out Pete's sake, people, is one little failed assassination attempt too much to ask for? Nothing permanently disabling, or anything like that; just a scratch, a flesh wound-- maybe Phil Schiller's arm in a sling for a couple of weeks. He's a hardy fella, he can take it. Besides, chicks dig scars. Because if something interesting doesn't shake up the Apple world soon, we're going to have to resort to claiming that typos in Apple marketing mailings point to imminent product releases. (Faithful viewer Andrew Allen points out that the ALT tag for one of the iBook G4 graphics in the latest edition of eNews refers to an "iBook G5"-- clearly it'll ship any day now!)

In the meantime, we're reduced to commenting on the product ratings that have started popping up at the online Apple Store in the past several days. Originally we only noticed them on Apple's own products: "Apple ratings" of one to five Apples-- or should we say, five to five Apples, since every single Apple product had a perfect five-Apple rating. Clicking the "What is this?" link underneath the rating popped up the cutesy explanation that "we give all Apple products a rating of '5 Apples' because we think they're great. Would you trust us to display less-than-perfect ratings on our own products? We didn't think so." Har de har har. We can't say for sure, of course, but the whole "Apple rating" thing looks like the work of a web developer who stayed up all night and then took prescription allergy medication on an empty stomach.

According to CNET, though, Apple has cut most of the cutesy explanation from its site, and has also started posting real ratings on the third party equipment it sells-- ratings based on customer-submitted reviews. So if you own, say, a Griffin iTrip and you love it to pieces and back again, you can inform others of your positive product experience by leaving a gushing review at the Apple Store; Apple will spend five business days (yeesh, it's easier to buy a handgun) thoroughly examining every character of your submission to ensure that its content is not "illegal, obscene, threatening, defamatory, invasive of privacy, infringing of intellectual property rights, or otherwise injurious to third parties or objectionable, and does not consist of or contain political campaigning or commercial solicitation." Assuming it's completely benign in every conceivable legal sense, Apple will post your review and average in your rating of one to five stars.

No, it's not an earth-shattering new feature or anything, but it can be helpful; there are a zillion FM transmitters from which to choose, for example, and it's nice to see at a glance which ones are getting the thumbs-up from the community. True, the lack of real ratings of Apple's own gear just smacks of deep-seated self-esteem issues, but still, it's a handy improvement. Consider it the next big step in the Amazonification of the Apple Store; One-Click shopping was Phase 1, these customer reviews are Phase 2, and hopefully Phase 3 will involve the Apple Store finally accepting AtAT as an affiliate site like Amazon did instead of rejecting us as "unfit." (Until that happens, guess where we'd rather you spend your money?)

Oh, those wascally, wascally wabbits in the major label music biz! We're all for the iTunes Music Store, and we think Steve Jobs and Apple definitely did a good thing in creating an alternate music distribution model that provides legal instant gratification at reasonable prices, but what a bummer that in order to create a service that most people would actually want to use, Apple had to deal with the devil. Sure, anyone can throw together a music download store, but without the Big Five (or is it Four now?) record labels onboard, any such store's catalog would be devoid of all the major label manufactured music-as-commodity-geared-for-the-lowest-common-denominator that most people would actually want to buy.

So Apple did what it had to, and the result is a wildly successful online music store with over a million songs available for purchase and artists getting fairly compensated for their work-- right? Well, sort of. What happens, of course, is the same thing that happens with any music sold that's created by an artist who's signed a contract with a label: the money goes to the label, and then the label passes along the artist's cut-- at least, in theory. Faithful viewer Frozen Tundra forwarded us an article in The Register which describes how Robert Fripp and King Crimson were effectively cheated out of their royalties by megalabel EMI, who originally advised Fripp "that digital downloads 'were not important'" and therefore his band should have no problem accepting 6 cents per download when EMI took 69. When the band replied that, if the downloads were "not important" anyway, EMI should be willing to give them a bigger cut, the label insisted that it needed all that money "to support the investment in downloading technology."

That's fairly ludicrous, of course, since it was Apple who made all the technical investments in getting the iTMS up and running, and Apple reportedly only gets 4 cents per song. Meanwhile, King Crimson never gave any download rights whatsoever to Virgin (part of EMI, you know), whose distribution deal with the band ended in June anyway-- except that King Crimson songs in the Virgin catalog have apparently been appearing on the iTMS and other services starting in July. EMI's response, when called on this? "We have notified our digital partners a number of times about the loss of rights and believe that we have discharged our obligations to you... if they continue to [exploit your repertoire] you should pursue them for infringement of your rights." Does anyone believe that Apple was the one screwing over King Crimson, here? Especially since EMI apparently kept collecting 69 cents per song sale-- and probably kept the band's 6 cents, too, since the contract had expired anyway.

So the big problem with the iTMS, at least from an artist's perspective, is presumably the same big problem all along: the major labels generally acting like greedy jerks. But we don't believe for a second that Steve Jobs doesn't know about that. Personally, we figure he's either milking the iTMS for iPod sales for as long as he can until the whole music business comes crashing down anyway (at which point he'll move on to the Next Big Thing), or he simply brought the majors on board in order to make the iTMS ubiquitous-- and once it's everywhere (and the lawsuit with the Beatles is settled), Apple will have the power to become essentially a record label in its own right, but working exclusively with downloadable music and dealing directly with the artists to cut out the 69-cents-per-song middleman. What do you think, sirs?

Hey, just out of curiosity, how much do you suppose a Wall Street analyst gets paid? Because after seven long years in the trenches of online soap opera production, we're toying with the idea of a lateral career move into a field that, just for a change of pace, is slightly less stressful than bomb squad "fodder duty" and pays slightly more than migrant farm work. Not that cranking this stuff out every day isn't a hoot, mind you, but let's put it this way: would you do it for seven years, especially not having slept since the middle of the Clinton administration? Exactly. So while we're not actively job-hunting, we like to keep our eyes open just in case something decent falls into our laps. You know, like a six-figure salary for sitting on our butts watching TV. That sort of thing.

That's where this whole "Wall Street analyst" thing comes in; obviously we don't know the whole story, but it seems to us that they have a pretty cushy racket going on. Based on what we've seen while ferreting out Nuggets o' Drama™ in the Apple world, the primary job functions of an analyst seem to be 1) to predict the performance of stocks and rate them accordingly, 2) to estimate future corporate earnings, and 3) to sit in on earnings conference calls and ask CFOs questions that make them reply "we don't comment on unannounced products." Honestly, how hard is any of that? Especially since no one seems to get held accountable when the estimates are way off base (when does Apple not beat the analyst consensus?), numbers are simply adjusted based on company announcements (we're not sure, but we think the recipe might be "good = up, bad = down"), and a lot of the "predictions" seem to get made after the fact.

Case in point: CBS MarketWatch reports that First Albany analyst Joel Wagonfeld has "increased his fiscal 2005 earnings estimate to $1.35 a share from $1.17 and revenue forecast to $10.8 billion from $10.2 billion" due to "higher expectations for iPod products, as well as for iMac, retail stores, and iTunes." Gee, let's see here: last week Steve announced new iPod models, pointed out that the iMac G5 has gotten Apple's best reviews ever, revealed new retail stores opening this month (including the first in the UK), and launched new European iTunes Music Stores currently separating thousands of new customers from their Euros. It's not exactly rocket science; pick a random dollar value out of a hat, tack it on to the previous estimates, and blammo-- time for that three-martini lunch.

Comparatively speaking, though, that was the hard part; Wagonfeld also "lifted his price target to $61 from $53 and reiterated his 'buy' rating" on Apple's stock. Now, since AAPL actually hit $53 nearly a week ago and is currently trading in the $55ish area, what do you suppose tipped him off to the idea that maybe he needed to raise his target price again?

Granted, for all we know, in a non-Apple-related capacity, those guys have to wrestle bears armed with Tasers before they get to collect a paycheck, but somehow we doubt it; it sounds to us like you track a particular company's movements, jiggle a few numbers around, and rake in the dough regardless of how wrong you might wind up being. Where do we sign up?

Then again, we bet those guys have to wear ties. Forget it. Besides, we could never leave all this behind. What, and give up show business?