What's happening here is not a shift to net 90, and it's also not an attempt by Apple to rip any rightsholders off.
Instead, it appears Apple and the major labels believe that three free months of Apple Music threatens to hurt Spotify's userbase growth at a crucial time for Spotify (fundraising pre-IPO). The industry has lost its faith in freemium (Apple Music, trial aside, has no free tier) and either this will kill Spotify or get them in line.
The indies, who overall can't afford losing three months of revenue, are just caught in the cross fire.
There's nothing in the contract between Sony and Spotify that's all that surprising. Even the large looking advance of $45M is only a small fraction of what Spotify would have paid Sony each year.
If anything, the "unfairness" of the contract terms is a reflection of the HUGE amount of leverage the record labels have because their content is so valuable. Is it evil for the labels to attempt to maximize their profit while minimizing Spotify's?
21 will surely dole out some of their 75% cut to hardware integration partners as a distribution fee. The ripoff here is for anyone ignorant enough to run one of these devices.
This may underrate the real difficulty of Spotify: convincing record labels to let them give away music for free on the assumption freemium would have a reasonable conversion rate to paid.
Roughly, "hearsay" means that the person testifying to a fact was not a witness to it themselves or does not have direct knowledge over it. So it's entirely possible that some parts of the affidavit are hearsay while others are acceptable testimony.
My reading: Bell Labs folks would have ordered it Programming > Math >> Computer Science. RTM was good at programming, was being taught CS at college, and took too long to learn that neither that nor math were for him and that Bell Labs had it right all along.
For a certain definition of "success", yes definitely. Uber's sky-high valuation (and the accompanying deluge of investment dollars) hinges on their ability to address a market larger than US taxicabs. So press about them doing something other than driving around people in a market other than this one is worth a lot.
Are these experiments dollars-and-cents profitable? Almost certainly not.
The fault for Hollywood's endless sequels, remakes, and remakes of the remake should probably be laid primarily at the feet of the American viewing public. We won't make the hike to the movies for artsy stuff like Birdman, but Spider-man I (Remake III)? Already got my ticket!
Square loses something like 25 cents per Square Cash transaction [1], and now they want more transactions? I wonder if Snapchat is paying those fees, and if so how they think they're going to make that money back from their users.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connect_Four