Okay, we may very well be dreaming, here (there's a lot of "not believing our own eyes" going on, what with the Red Sox sweeping the World Series and all), and we were going to rant about John "The Gooch" Dvorak's latest spot of drivel about how the release of the iPod U2 Special Edition has apparently precipitated the imminent collapse of Western Civilization or something, but we suspect the article's been changed. When faithful viewer Gilbert first pointed it out to us, we could have sworn that Dvorak had made the wildly inaccurate assertion that the U2 iPod included 400+ U2 tracks preloaded on its hard drive.

If that was indeed what he said, then the article's been edited, because now it complains that Steve Jobs forces owners of the U2 iPod to "download the U2 collection later instead of putting it on the unit himself." Maybe it always said that and we're just hallucinating again; no matter, though, since if it was amended after someone finally clued him into the fact that the U2 iPod has no preloaded music (something which he would have known for himself in the first place if he could have pretended to be an actual journalist just long enough to read a freakin' press release), that person failed to mention to him that the U2 iPod doesn't include any U2 songs at all, preloaded or not-- merely a coupon for $50 off the purchase of the $149 U2 collection. In other words, he's wrong no matter what, which is sort of a bummer for him, because his article largely springs from his mistaken assumption that U2's music comes with the U2 iPod, whether you have to download it or not.

(Whoever tipped him off should also have mentioned that the product isn't an "iPOD," but rather an "iPod"-- a fact Dvorak himself could have gleaned from, say, loading Apple's home page, or just not having been comatose and/or addicted to prescription cough syrup for the past three years.)

Anyway, as best as we can make out, John's complaint is that the U2 music bundled with the iPod (which doesn't actually get bundled, mind you) is worth a lot less than the $149 Apple charges for the standalone collection. He figures that since older back-catalog songs can typically be licensed for inclusion on crappy K-teleqsue as-seen-on-TV compilation CDs (like Monster Ballads-- "they taught us how to love!") for "4-cents a track to 18-cents a track with today's average hovering at about 13-cents," Apple's actual cost to assemble the U2 collection is only about $50, meaning that "the bundle done as a licensing deal should be sold for far less than $100, not $149."

Of course, since he went to Fantasy Records for his pricing data, Johnny-boy has apparently forgotten that Apple doesn't make jazz compilation CDs, or he fails to consider that licensing a song for online distribution doesn't necessarily cost the same as licensing it for inclusion on a CD. Everything we've seen thus far has indicated that Apple pays the record labels "62 cents or more" per song downloaded (regardless of how old the songs might be), and the labels may well have insisted on a price premium to help offset its losses to digital piracy or some such nonsense like that.

In any case, Dvorak certainly can't reasonably claim to know what Apple's licensing cost of the U2 catalog might be, and nor can we; we assume that Apple's getting a nice discount on the U2 stuff due to the cross-promotion, but we don't pretend to have any numbers. Regardless, we can certainly say this: if Apple were really paying as little as four cents for all its older tracks, the iTunes Music Store would be posting way higher profits than it has thus far.

So, to sum up, John Dvorak's outright wrong about half the stuff he says and the other half can't be reasonably verified. In other words, as usual, it's journalism at its finest. Yee-haw.