BlackBerry Maker Unveils Its New Line

Marcus Yam for The New York Times

Thorsten Heins, the chief executive of BlackBerry, which was known as Research in Motion, introduces the company's new phones.

BlackBerry’s maker unveiled a new operating system and a new line of phones on Wednesday, along with a new corporate name, with the hope of restoring its products’ status as a symbol of executive cool.Analysts, technology reviewers and app developers with advance access to the BlackBerry Z10 and the BlackBerry 10 operating system have said it is the company’s first competitive touch-screen phone. But BlackBerry 10 arrives long after Apple’s iPhone and phones using Google’s Android operating system have come to dominate the smartphone market that the BlackBerry effectively created. According to IDC, BlackBerry now holds just 4.6 percent of that market, about one-tenth of its historic peak.

To emphasize the changes brought by the new operating system, Thorsten Heins, who took over as chief executive a year ago, said the company, known until now as Research In Motion, had adopted BlackBerry as its corporate name. Its Nasdaq trading symbol will become BBRY, and it will trade as BB in Toronto.

In addition to the BlackBerry Z10 phone, there will be a second model, the Q10, that includes one of the line’s signature physical keyboards.

Verizon Wireless announced that it would price the Z10 at $200 with a two-year contract. It will also be carried by AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile.

“Today represents a new day in the history of BlackBerry,” Mr. Heins said. “These BlackBerry 10 devices are absolutely the best typing experiences in the industry.”

BlackBerry said the Z10 would be available in the United States in March and in Canada on Feb. 5.

There were few surprises in the initial portion of Mr. Heins’s presentation at an event in New York. The company began demonstrating the touch-screen phone and operating system in May and also made prototypes available to app developers at the time. In recent weeks, photographs of the final version of the phones have made their way to various American and European technology Web sites.

Physically, the Z10 resembles an iPhone 5 with its corners snipped off.

But unlike its competitors, the Z10 lacks a button to take users back to a home page and relies entirely on users swiping their fingers across the 4.2-inch screen from different directions to summon features or menus.

While the Z10 lacks a physical keyboard, the main attraction of BlackBerrys for many current users, the company said that it had developed software which should alleviate some of the inadequacies of on-screen typing. According to BlackBerry, its software studies users’ common typing mistakes over time and then starts automatically correcting them. It will also build up a list of commonly used words and offer them as suggestions that can be selected with a flick of a finger.

While developing the new operating system, the company took great pains to improve its strained relationship with app developers. The operating system was also designed in a way that allows them to adapt Android apps for BlackBerry 10 by making some relatively minor modifications.

BlackBerry said Wednesday that more than 70,000 BlackBerry 10 apps were now available.

For corporate and government users, BlackBerry 10 server software will allow them to divide employees’ BlackBerry 10 phones into separate work and personal spheres and give I.T. managers complete control over the former.

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Phys Ed: Helmets for Ski and Snowboard Safety

Recently, researchers from the department of sport science at the University of Innsbruck in Austria stood on the slopes at a local ski resort and trained a radar gun on a group of about 500 skiers and snowboarders, each of whom had completed a lengthy personality questionnaire about whether he or she tended to be cautious or a risk taker.

The researchers had asked their volunteers to wear their normal ski gear and schuss or ride down the slopes at their preferred speed. Although they hadn’t informed the volunteers, their primary aim was to determine whether wearing a helmet increased people’s willingness to take risks, in which case helmets could actually decrease safety on the slopes.

What they found was reassuring.

To many of us who hit the slopes with, in my case, literal regularity — I’m an ungainly novice snowboarder — the value of wearing a helmet can seem self-evident. They protect your head from severe injury. During the Big Air finals at the Winter X Games in Aspen, Colo., this past weekend, for instance, 23-year-old Icelandic snowboarder Halldor Helgason over-rotated on a triple back flip, landed head-first on the snow, and was briefly knocked unconscious. But like the other competitors he was wearing a helmet, and didn’t fracture his skull.

Indeed, studies have concluded that helmets reduce the risk of a serious head injury by as much as 60 percent. But a surprising number of safety experts and snowsport enthusiasts remain unconvinced that helmets reduce overall injury risk.

Why? A telling 2009 survey of ski patrollers from across the country found that 77 percent did not wear helmets because they worried that the headgear could reduce their peripheral vision, hearing and response times, making them slower and clumsier. In addition, many worried that if they wore helmets, less-adept skiers and snowboarders might do likewise, feel invulnerable and engage in riskier behavior on the slopes.

In the past several years, a number of researchers have attempted to resolve these concerns, for or against helmets. And in almost all instances, helmets have proved their value.

In the Innsbruck speed experiment, the researchers found that people whom the questionnaires showed to be risk takers skied and rode faster than those who were by nature cautious. No surprise.

But wearing a helmet did not increase people’s speed, as would be expected if the headgear encouraged risk taking. Cautious people were slower than risk-takers, whether they wore helmets or not; and risk-takers were fast, whether their heads were helmeted or bare.

Interestingly, the skiers and riders who were the most likely, in general, to don a helmet were the most expert, the men and women with the most talent and hours on the slopes. Experience seemed to have taught them the value of a helmet.

Off of the slopes, other new studies have brought skiers and snowboarders into the lab to test their reaction times and vision with and without helmets. Peripheral vision and response times are a serious safety concern in a sport where skiers and riders rapidly converge from multiple directions.

But when researchers asked snowboarders and skiers to wear caps, helmets, goggles or various combinations of each for a 2011 study and then had them sit before a computer screen and press a button when certain images popped up, they found that volunteers’ peripheral vision and reaction times were virtually unchanged when they wore a helmet, compared with wearing a hat. Goggles slightly reduced peripheral vision and increased response times. But helmets had no significant effect.

Even when researchers added music, testing snowboarders and skiers wearing Bluetooth-audio equipped helmets, response times did not increase significantly from when they wore wool caps.

So why do up to 40 percent of skiers and snowboarders still avoid helmets?

“The biggest reason, I think, is that many people never expect to fall,” says Dr. Adil H. Haider, a trauma surgeon and associate professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and co-author of a major new review of studies related to winter helmet use. “That attitude is especially common in people, like me, who are comfortable on blue runs but maybe not on blacks, and even more so in beginners.”

But a study published last spring detailing snowboarding injuries over the course of 18 seasons at a Vermont ski resort found that the riders at greatest risk of hurting themselves were female beginners. I sympathize.

The takeaway from the growing body of science about ski helmets is in fact unequivocal, Dr. Haider said. “Helmets are safe. They don’t seem to increase risk taking. And they protect against serious, even fatal head injuries.”

The Eastern Association for the Surgery of Trauma, of which Dr. Haider is a member, has issued a recommendation that “all recreational skiers and snowboarders should wear safety helmets,” making them the first medical group to go on record advocating universal helmet use.

Perhaps even more persuasive, Dr. Haider has given helmets to all of his family members and colleagues who ski or ride. “As a trauma surgeon, I know how difficult it is to fix a brain,” he said. “So everyone I care about wears a helmet.”

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Phys Ed: Helmets for Ski and Snowboard Safety

Recently, researchers from the department of sport science at the University of Innsbruck in Austria stood on the slopes at a local ski resort and trained a radar gun on a group of about 500 skiers and snowboarders, each of whom had completed a lengthy personality questionnaire about whether he or she tended to be cautious or a risk taker.

The researchers had asked their volunteers to wear their normal ski gear and schuss or ride down the slopes at their preferred speed. Although they hadn’t informed the volunteers, their primary aim was to determine whether wearing a helmet increased people’s willingness to take risks, in which case helmets could actually decrease safety on the slopes.

What they found was reassuring.

To many of us who hit the slopes with, in my case, literal regularity — I’m an ungainly novice snowboarder — the value of wearing a helmet can seem self-evident. They protect your head from severe injury. During the Big Air finals at the Winter X Games in Aspen, Colo., this past weekend, for instance, 23-year-old Icelandic snowboarder Halldor Helgason over-rotated on a triple back flip, landed head-first on the snow, and was briefly knocked unconscious. But like the other competitors he was wearing a helmet, and didn’t fracture his skull.

Indeed, studies have concluded that helmets reduce the risk of a serious head injury by as much as 60 percent. But a surprising number of safety experts and snowsport enthusiasts remain unconvinced that helmets reduce overall injury risk.

Why? A telling 2009 survey of ski patrollers from across the country found that 77 percent did not wear helmets because they worried that the headgear could reduce their peripheral vision, hearing and response times, making them slower and clumsier. In addition, many worried that if they wore helmets, less-adept skiers and snowboarders might do likewise, feel invulnerable and engage in riskier behavior on the slopes.

In the past several years, a number of researchers have attempted to resolve these concerns, for or against helmets. And in almost all instances, helmets have proved their value.

In the Innsbruck speed experiment, the researchers found that people whom the questionnaires showed to be risk takers skied and rode faster than those who were by nature cautious. No surprise.

But wearing a helmet did not increase people’s speed, as would be expected if the headgear encouraged risk taking. Cautious people were slower than risk-takers, whether they wore helmets or not; and risk-takers were fast, whether their heads were helmeted or bare.

Interestingly, the skiers and riders who were the most likely, in general, to don a helmet were the most expert, the men and women with the most talent and hours on the slopes. Experience seemed to have taught them the value of a helmet.

Off of the slopes, other new studies have brought skiers and snowboarders into the lab to test their reaction times and vision with and without helmets. Peripheral vision and response times are a serious safety concern in a sport where skiers and riders rapidly converge from multiple directions.

But when researchers asked snowboarders and skiers to wear caps, helmets, goggles or various combinations of each for a 2011 study and then had them sit before a computer screen and press a button when certain images popped up, they found that volunteers’ peripheral vision and reaction times were virtually unchanged when they wore a helmet, compared with wearing a hat. Goggles slightly reduced peripheral vision and increased response times. But helmets had no significant effect.

Even when researchers added music, testing snowboarders and skiers wearing Bluetooth-audio equipped helmets, response times did not increase significantly from when they wore wool caps.

So why do up to 40 percent of skiers and snowboarders still avoid helmets?

“The biggest reason, I think, is that many people never expect to fall,” says Dr. Adil H. Haider, a trauma surgeon and associate professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and co-author of a major new review of studies related to winter helmet use. “That attitude is especially common in people, like me, who are comfortable on blue runs but maybe not on blacks, and even more so in beginners.”

But a study published last spring detailing snowboarding injuries over the course of 18 seasons at a Vermont ski resort found that the riders at greatest risk of hurting themselves were female beginners. I sympathize.

The takeaway from the growing body of science about ski helmets is in fact unequivocal, Dr. Haider said. “Helmets are safe. They don’t seem to increase risk taking. And they protect against serious, even fatal head injuries.”

The Eastern Association for the Surgery of Trauma, of which Dr. Haider is a member, has issued a recommendation that “all recreational skiers and snowboarders should wear safety helmets,” making them the first medical group to go on record advocating universal helmet use.

Perhaps even more persuasive, Dr. Haider has given helmets to all of his family members and colleagues who ski or ride. “As a trauma surgeon, I know how difficult it is to fix a brain,” he said. “So everyone I care about wears a helmet.”

Read More..

BlackBerry 10’s Debut Is a Critical Day for Research in Motion

OTTAWA — Research in Motion’s introduction on Wednesday of a new BlackBerry phone will be the most important event in the company’s history since 1996, when its founders showed investors a small block of wood and promised that a wireless e-mail device shaped like that would change business forever.

Now with just 4.6 percent of the global market for smartphones in 2012, according to IDC, RIM long ago exchanged dominance for survival mode. On Wednesday, the company will introduce a new line of smartphones called the BlackBerry 10 and an operating system of the same name that Thorsten Heins, the president and chief executive of RIM, says will restore the company to glory.

But Frank Mersch, who became one of RIM’s earliest investors after seeing the block of wood, is far less excited by what he sees this time around.

“You’re in a very, very competitive market and you’re not the leader,” Mr. Mersch, now the chairman and a vice president at Front Street Capital in Toronto, said of RIM. “You have to ask: ‘At the end of the day are we really going to win?’ I personally think the jury’s out on that.”

The main elements of the new phones and their operating system are already well known. Mr. Heins and other executives at RIM have been demonstrating the units for months to a variety of audiences. App developers received prototype versions as far back as last spring.

While analysts and app developers may be divided about the future of RIM, there is a consensus that BlackBerry 10, which arrives more than year behind schedule, was worth the wait.

Initially RIM will release two variations of the BlackBerry 10, one a touch-screen model that resembles many other phones now on the market. The other model is a hybrid with a keyboard similar to those now found on current BlackBerrys as well as a small touch screen.

The real revolution, though, may be in the software that manages a person’s business and personal information. It is clearly designed with an eye toward retaining and, more important, luring back, corporate users.

Corporate and government information technology managers will be able to segregate business-related apps and data on BlackBerry 10 handsets from users’ personal material through a system known as BlackBerry Balance. It will enable an I.T. manager to, among other things, remotely wipe corporate data from fired employees’ phones while leaving the newly jobless workers’ personal photos, e-mails, music and apps untouched. The system can also block users from forwarding or copying information from the work side of the phone.

Messages generated by e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, instant messaging and LinkedIn accounts are automatically consolidated into a single in-box that RIM calls BlackBerry Hub.

Charles Golvin, an analyst with Forrester Research, called the new phones “beautiful” and described the operating system as “a giant leap forward” from RIM’s current operating system. Ray Sharma, who followed RIM’s glory years as a financial analyst but who now runs XMG Studio, a mobile games developer in Toronto, has been similarly impressed.

But both men are among many analysts who question the ability of BlackBerry 10, whatever its merits, to revive RIM’s fallen fortunes.

“If it’s good, it will help inspire the upgrade cycle,” Mr. Sharma said. “But it has to be great in order to inspire touch-screen users to come back. If it’s good, not great, I will be concerned.”

Mr. Golvin was more blunt. “They’ll need to prove themselves in the face of a simultaneous onslaught of marketing from Microsoft, not to mention the continued push from Apple plus Google and its Android partners,” he wrote. “This is a gargantuan challenge for a company of RIM’s size.”

In the year since he took over from the founders, Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, Mr. Heins has certainly remade RIM. He cut 5,000 jobs in a program to reduce operating costs by about $1 billion a year. Along the way, he also replaced RIM’s senior management and straightened out its balance sheet. While unprofitable, RIM remains debt-free and holds $2.9 billion in cash.

With BlackBerry 10, RIM not only started over with its operating system, it also rebuilt the company through acquisitions. Its core operating system comes from QNX Software Systems, the design of the user interface is largely the work of the Astonishing Tribe in Sweden while other main components, like the touch-screen technology, came from smaller companies that are now part of RIM.

Integrating all of those acquisitions, analysts and former RIM employees say, added to the delays that plagued BlackBerry 10.

Now that the new phones are finally here, Mr. Heins is counting on RIM’s remaining base of 79 million users globally to eagerly upgrade. But where those customers reside may be as important in their numbers in determining the success of that plan.

In the United States, which leads the world in setting smartphone trends, about 11 million BlackBerry users switched to other phones between 2009 and the middle of last year, according to an analysis by Horace Dediu on Asymco, a wireless industry blog he founded.

Until the final months of 2012, RIM continued to increase its subscriber base through sales of low-cost handsets to less developed countries like Nigeria and Indonesia. Although BlackBerry 10 will be made available worldwide, the initial phones will be too expensive for a majority of BlackBerry fans in those regions.

RIM may also have confused its loyalists, particularly in North America and Europe, in the run-up to the BlackBerry 10 debut. Many of those users stuck with BlackBerrys because of their physical keyboards. But public demonstrations for BlackBerry 10 were centered on the touch-screen-only version and its virtual keyboard.

While some corporations have remained loyal to BlackBerry, RIM not only has to sell them on the new handsets, it also must persuade them to upgrade server software to accommodate the new operating system, a costly and time-consuming process. Companies whose employees continue to use older BlackBerrys will have to run two separate BlackBerry servers.

Mr. Heins’s pitch to those corporations is that the BlackBerry 10 server software will also allow them to manage and control data on employees’ Android phones and iPhones. But any corporation or organization that allows those phones to connect with its systems long ago installed mobile device management software from other companies, including Good Technology and SAP. RIM is likely to find that the competition in device management software is as severe as it is in the handset business.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 30, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated part of the name of the Toronto company where Frank Mersch is the chairman and a vice president. It is First Street Capital, not Front Street Capital.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 30, 2013

An earlier version of this correction misspelled Frank Mersch’s surname as Mersh.

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IHT Rendezvous: Dutch Arts Groups Shut Down as Funding Vanishes

AMSTERDAM — In the 1980s and ’90s, the Netherlands had a reputation as a kind of paradise for artists. Graduates of fine arts academies could receive long-term grants and special housing subsidies to support them so they wouldn’t have to get day jobs. Edgy theater groups and small contemporary classical ensembles were fully financed to create innovative and experimental work. The government even bought art directly from artists who weren’t particularly commercial, maintaining it in large storage facilities, simply to support artistic production.

That all started to change during the first decade of this century as lawmakers in the Netherlands became more conservative and budgets began to shrink. After the financial crisis hit Holland in 2008, the controversy about spending on the arts began to mount, reaching a fever pitch in 2011 and 2012, as the conservative-led coalition government took aim at culture.

As I wrote today in an article for the IHT, about two dozen cultural organizations across the Netherlands are shutting their doors as dramatic cuts to the nation’s arts budgets have begun to take effect. Dance companies, orchestras, musical heritage foundations and nonprofit art galleries, some of which have been operating for decades, are closing down.

Among the victims of the first round of cuts have been the Theater Institute Netherlands, which houses the nation’s theater museum, the acclaimed contemporary dance ensemble Dansgroep Amsterdam, and the Radio Chamber Philharmonic, a classical orchestra whose performances have been broadcast since the end of World War II.

Starting on Jan. 1 this year, federal financing for the arts dropped by 22 percent, while regional, provincial and local governments cut anywhere from 10 to 20 percent from their arts budgets, resulting in an overall loss of about €470 million in subsidies to the culture sector as a whole. Most of the country’s established institutions, like the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum, are faring with slightly lower budgets, but some others have seen their subsidies vanish overnight.

“You will see that most of the institutions that will collapse or that will fall out of the system are the mid-sized or smaller ones,” said Jeroen Bartlese, secretary general of the Raad voor Cultuur, or Dutch Culture Council. “There will be fewer performances, there will be less things to see, culture will be less diverse. The Netherlands has been known as internationally as being a haven, a good place for talents to experiment, to show off, to learn and to develop their talent. I certainly hope that won’t go away, and maybe it won’t because you don’t break down a tradition that easily, but at the moment there are quite a few organizations that fall away, and that is concerning.”

Although the conservative-led government was replaced with a more moderate Dutch parliament in September, the cuts to the cultural sector have not been rolled back. And the rhetoric that was used to justify the slicing has had a demoralizing effect as well.

“The Rutte government painted artists as elitist, parasitic, sophisticated beggars, living off state subsidies, basically procrastinating,” said Ann Demeester, director of De Appel art center in Amsterdam.

Efforts to find alternative and private sources of funding for the arts have begun, but it’s unlikely that such funding will come in time to save many of the groups that have lost their subsidies already this year.

“The way it was done was just too big and too quick, which may have led to the disappearance, and the end, of some institutions,” Mr. Bartlese said. “More than was necessary, if it had been phased in properly.”

How should the country’s arts groups go about rebuilding themselves? Will they be able to find private sources of funding to fill in the gaps? Are there other regions where arts organizations have found ways to generate needed funding that can serve as models for those in the Netherlands?

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The Caucus: LaHood to Leave Transportation Department

Ray LaHood, the former Republican congressman from Illinois who has run the nation’s Transportation Department under President Obama, will not serve a second term, he told department employees in a letter on Tuesday.

“I’ve told President Obama, and I’ve told many of you, that this is the best job I’ve ever had. I’m grateful to have the opportunity to work with all of you,” Mr. LaHood wrote. He cited the department’s efforts to curb distracted driving and to increase the efficiency of automobiles by raising emissions standards.

As transportation secretary, Mr. LaHood was at the center of efforts to reduce fatigue among pilots and called for greater investment in high-speed rail. He also pushed for large fines against Toyota for safety problems and for a new transportation bill in Congress.

“We have made great progress in improving the safety of our transit systems, pipelines, and highways, and in reducing roadway fatalities to historic lows,” he said. “We have strengthened consumer protections with new regulations on buses, trucks, and airlines.”

Mr. LaHood’s decision makes him the latest in a series of members of the president’s original cabinet to announce their departure in the last several weeks.

In a statement, Mr. Obama praised Mr. LaHood, the last remaining Republican from the president’s first-term cabinet, as a public servant who has been more interested in practical solutions than in partisan politics.

“Years ago, we were drawn together by a shared belief that those of us in public service owe an allegiance not to party or faction, but to the people we were elected to represent,” the president wrote. “And Ray has never wavered in that belief.”

Several people have been mentioned as possible replacements for Mr. LaHood at the Transportation Department. Among them: Antonio Villaraigosa, the Democratic mayor of Los Angeles; Ed Rendell, the former governor of Pennsylvania; Debbie Hersman, the chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board; and Jennifer Granholm, the former Democratic governor of Michigan.

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Follow Michael D. Shear on Twitter at @shearm.

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This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 29, 2013

Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this post said that Mr. LaHood was the sole Republican to serve in Mr. Obama's first-term cabinet. Robert Gates, a Republican who served as defense secretary under President George W. Bush, was re-appointed by Mr. Obama.

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Well: Ask Well: Long-Term Use of Nicotine Gum

In small doses, like those contained in the gum, nicotine is generally considered safe. But it does have stimulant properties that can raise blood pressure, increase heart rate and constrict blood vessels. One large report from 2010 found that compared to people given a placebo, those who used nicotine replacement therapies had a higher risk of heart palpitations and chest pains.

That’s one reason that nicotine gum should, ideally, be used for no more than four to six months, said Lauren Indorf, a nurse practitioner with the Cleveland Clinic’s Tobacco Treatment Center. Yet up to 10 percent of people use it for longer periods, in some cases for a decade or more she said.

Some research has raised speculation that long-term use of nicotine might also raise the risk of cancer, though it has mostly involved laboratory and animal research, and there have not been any long-term randomized studies specifically addressing this question in people. One recent report that reviewed the evidence on nicotine replacement therapy and cancer concluded that, “the risk, if any, seems small compared with continued smoking.”

Ultimately, the biggest problem with using nicotine gum for long periods is that the longer you stay on it, the longer you remain dependent on nicotine, and thus the greater your odds of a smoking relapse, said Ms. Indorf. “What if the gum is not available one day?” she said. “Your body is still relying on nicotine.”

If you find yourself using it for longer than six months, it may be time to consider switching to sugar-free gum or even another replacement therapy, like the patch or nasal spray.

“Getting people on a different regimen helps them break the gum habit and can help taper them off nicotine,” Ms. Indorf said.

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Well: Ask Well: Long-Term Use of Nicotine Gum

In small doses, like those contained in the gum, nicotine is generally considered safe. But it does have stimulant properties that can raise blood pressure, increase heart rate and constrict blood vessels. One large report from 2010 found that compared to people given a placebo, those who used nicotine replacement therapies had a higher risk of heart palpitations and chest pains.

That’s one reason that nicotine gum should, ideally, be used for no more than four to six months, said Lauren Indorf, a nurse practitioner with the Cleveland Clinic’s Tobacco Treatment Center. Yet up to 10 percent of people use it for longer periods, in some cases for a decade or more she said.

Some research has raised speculation that long-term use of nicotine might also raise the risk of cancer, though it has mostly involved laboratory and animal research, and there have not been any long-term randomized studies specifically addressing this question in people. One recent report that reviewed the evidence on nicotine replacement therapy and cancer concluded that, “the risk, if any, seems small compared with continued smoking.”

Ultimately, the biggest problem with using nicotine gum for long periods is that the longer you stay on it, the longer you remain dependent on nicotine, and thus the greater your odds of a smoking relapse, said Ms. Indorf. “What if the gum is not available one day?” she said. “Your body is still relying on nicotine.”

If you find yourself using it for longer than six months, it may be time to consider switching to sugar-free gum or even another replacement therapy, like the patch or nasal spray.

“Getting people on a different regimen helps them break the gum habit and can help taper them off nicotine,” Ms. Indorf said.

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Streaming Shakes Up Music Industry’s Model for Royalties

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Zoe Keating published on her blog the details of what she made in royalties from the Web streaming of her music. It wasn’t a lot.

Like plenty of music fans, Sam Broe jumped at the chance to join Spotify two summers ago, and he hasn’t looked back.

Spotify, which began streaming music in Sweden in 2008, lets users choose from millions of songs over the Internet free or by subscription, and is increasingly seen as representing the future of music consumption. Mr. Broe, a 26-year-old from Brooklyn, said that having all that music at his fingertips helped him trim his monthly music budget from $30 to the $10 fee he pays for Spotify’s premium service.

“The only time I download anything on iTunes is in the rare case that I can’t find it on Spotify,” he said.

A decade after Apple revolutionized the music world with its iTunes store, the music industry is undergoing another, even more radical, digital transformation as listeners begin to move from CDs and downloads to streaming services like Spotify, Pandora and YouTube.

As purveyors of legally licensed music, they have been largely welcomed by an industry still buffeted by piracy. But as the companies behind these digital services swell into multibillion-dollar enterprises, the relative trickle of money that has made its way to artists is causing anxiety at every level of the business.

Late last year, Zoe Keating, an independent musician from Northern California, provided an unusually detailed case in point. In voluminous spreadsheets posted to her Tumblr blog, she revealed the royalties she gets from various services, down to the ten-thousandth of a cent.

Even for an under-the-radar artist like Ms. Keating, who describes her style as “avant cello,” the numbers painted a stark picture of what it is like to be a working musician these days. After her songs had been played more than 1.5 million times on Pandora over six months, she earned $1,652.74. On Spotify, 131,000 plays last year netted just $547.71, or an average of 0.42 cent a play.

“In certain types of music, like classical or jazz, we are condemning them to poverty if this is going to be the only way people consume music,” Ms. Keating said.

The way streaming services pay royalties represents a major shift in the economic gears that have been underlying the industry for decades.

From 78 r.p.m. records to the age of iTunes, artists’ record royalties have been counted as a percentage of a sale price. On a 99-cent download, a typical artist may earn 7 to 10 cents after deductions for the retailer, the record company and the songwriter, music executives say. One industry joke calls the flow of these royalties a “river of nickels.”

In the new economics of streaming music, however, the river of nickels looks more like a torrent of micropennies.

Spotify, Pandora and others like them pay fractions of a cent to record companies and publishers each time a song is played, some portion of which goes to performers and songwriters as royalties. Unlike the royalties from a sale, these payments accrue every time a listener clicks on a song, year after year.

The question dogging the music industry is whether these micropayments can add up to anything substantial.

“No artist will be able to survive to be professionals except those who have a significant live business, and that’s very few,” said Hartwig Masuch, chief executive of BMG Rights Management.

Spotify has 20 million users in 17 countries, with five million of them paying $5 to $10 a month to eliminate the ads seen by freeloaders.

In a recent interview, Sean Parker, a board member, said he believed Spotify would eventually attract enough subscribers to help return the music industry to its former glory — that is, to the days before Mr. Parker’s first major enterprise, Napster, came along.

“I believe that Spotify is the company that will make it succeed,” said Mr. Parker, who is also a former president of Facebook. “It’s the right model if you want to build the pot of money back up to where it was in the late ’90s, when the industry was at its peak. This is the only model that’s going to get you there.”

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Ukrainian General Given Life Sentence in Killing of Journalist

MOSCOW — A Ukrainian court sentenced a former security official to life in prison on Tuesday for the death of Georgy Gongadze, a journalist whose mysterious death in 2002 provoked an international outcry and helped set off protests against the president at the time, Leonid D. Kuchma.

The former security official, Gen. Oleksei Pukach, who once headed a surveillance department for Ukraine’s Interior Ministry, testified that he had not intended to kill Mr. Gongadze, but strangled him with a belt accidentally in the course of an interrogation. He is the highest-ranking official to be convicted in Mr. Gongadze’s death.

Mr. Gongadze went missing in 2000 and his body was found two months later, beheaded, in a forest 75 miles from Kiev, the capital. He had infuriated the president, Mr. Kuchma, with muckraking publications in Ukrainskaya Pravda, an Internet newspaper he had founded.

Suspicions of official involvement grew with the release of covert recordings made by one of Mr. Kuchma’s bodyguards, in which the a man who sounded like the president spoke of Mr. Gongadze, telling a subordinate to “throw him out, give him to the Chechens.”

The killing came to epitomize the role that crime had come to play in Ukrainian politics and provoked a wave of demonstrations that some describe as the first manifestation of the 2004 Orange Revolution.

Three former police officers who stood trial over Mr. Gongadze’s death said that he had climbed into what he believed to be a taxi and was taken to a location outside Kiev, where he was beaten and strangled, doused with gasoline and burned.

General Pukach said he had been trying to force Mr. Gongadze to confess to espionage, something Mr. Gongadze refused to do, though he did admit accepting $400,000 from Western diplomats for passing on information.

Volodymyr Shilov, a prosecutor, said that General Pukach had testified that he was carrying out an order, but would not say what the order was or who issued it, according to the Interfax news agency. But just before guards took him away on Tuesday, General Pukach gave a revealing response to journalists who asked him to comment on the verdict, telling them to direct their questions to Mr. Kuchma and his chief of staff, Volodymyr Lytvyn.

“Ask Kuchma and Lytvyn, they’ll tell you everything,” he said, according to Interfax. “I told everything during the investigation and trial. So ask Lytvyn and Kuchma about their motives and intentions.”

The trial was mostly closed to journalists, who were allowed to be present only for the verdict and sentencing. But a lawyer representing Mr. Gongadze’s widow complained that the investigation and trial were flawed and inconsistent, overlooking evidence that General Pukach had intended to kill Mr. Gongadze.

“He spoke clearly about receiving an order to kill burn and bury him, and he was prepared for this,” said the lawyer, Valentyna Telychenko, in comments broadcast on television. “He brought a shovel and a canister of gasoline, meaning his actions were directed toward murder, and nothing else.”

General Pukach testified that he had been ordered to conduct surveillance by Ukraine’s interior minister — a man who was found dead in 2005, hours before he was to be questioned by prosecutors in the matter. Officials called it a suicide, though Ukrainian news agencies said he had suffered two gunshot wounds.

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