Apple meets the enemy

by Henry Farrell on May 2, 2006

“Austan Goolsbee”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/27/technology/27scene.html?ex=1303790400&en=37d41d9406c1d512&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss writes in the _NYT_ that France’s efforts to make iTunes inter-operable with non-Apple music players is a bad idea.

bq. In iTunes War, France Has Met the Enemy. Perhaps It Is France.

bq. … The legislature paid no mind to such analysis and seems not to have considered innovation at all. Therein lies the danger. Apple largely created the online market for legal music. The record labels’ own attempts flopped embarrassingly. Until iTunes, virtually no one paid for online music. Since then, iTunes has sold more than one billion songs. Its success comes largely from two crucial innovations. First, Apple’s music store is simple and works extremely well with the iPod. Find the music. Click “Buy It.” Drag the files onto the iPod icon. That’s it. Experiences with other players and music stores are far more complicated. Further, iTunes keeps getting better. Apple has added video capability, celebrity play lists, exclusive music, the ability to convert home movies into iPod format, and many other features — all free. Second, iTunes has lots of music. Largely because of the innovative iTunes FairPlay copy protection and digital rights management software, Apple persuaded major record labels to let them sell much of their best content online. The combination of simplicity and variety proved a huge winner. … If the French gave away the codes, Apple would lose much of its rationale for improving iTunes. … Opening the codes threatens that link. Apple would need to pay for iTunes features with profits from iTunes itself. Prices would rise. Innovation would slow. Even worse, sharing the codes could make it easier for hackers to unravel Apple’s FairPlay software. Without strong copy protection, labels would not supply as much new music.

The issue is moot – it appears that the French proposal has been very substantially weakened – but I’m not convinced by Goolsbee’s underlying claims. There seem to be two elements to Goolsbee’s arguments. First he makes a claim about the need to protect Apple’s quasi-monopoly in order to protect innovation. There’s a reasonable argument to be made here, but as far as I’m aware, economists have very considerable difficulty in coming up with convincing arguments about the appropriate level of protection necessary to encourage innovation. Even if you buy the basic claim, it’s hard to come up with a convincing rationale for the claim that Apple’s protections are just right for encouraging innovation, and that a weakening of those protections mightn’t have salutary effects. Indeed, there’s a plausible economic case for skepticism about the value of intellectual property protection _tout court_: see the discussion in Benkler’s _Wealth of Networks_.

Second, Goolsbee claims that sharing codes would make it easier for hackers to break FairPlay. This seems to me to be even less convincing. As best as I can tell, the main reason why hackers aren’t interested in breaking FairPlay isn’t because it would be difficult, but because it’s unnecessary. There is a very well known security hole in Apple’s system – you can burn your music to an unprotected CD, and then make mp3s, Ogg Vorbis files or whatever to your heart’s content. Hence, I suspect, the abandonment of PyMusique and other efforts to circumvent Apple’s controls – there’s no point to them.

All this said, I think that there’s a plausible rationale to support Apple’s power, but it doesn’t flow from mainstream economics or from the purported virtues of DRM. It comes instead from Galbraith’s idea of countervailing powers. As the “FT”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/297eecc2-d934-11da-8b06-0000779e2340.html reported yesterday, Apple seems to have done what antitrust authorities on both sides of the Atlantic have failed dismally to do – to make it more difficult for record companies to collude in setting prices and reap the ensuing oligopoly profits. It’s forced the record labels to commoditize albums by selling them at a price which is considerably lower than the price that the record companies would prefer – given sagging sales of CDs, the labels have had little choice but to accede to Apple’s terms. None of this is to say that Apple may not abuse its position in the future – but for the moment at least, it appears to be having a valuable chastening effect.

{ 26 comments }

1

Phil 05.02.06 at 1:49 pm

Doesn’t tying the Ipod to ITunes create a barrier to entry to the market? Sure, there’s a big security hole, but not so big that I can easily switch to another mp3 player. The idea that some other player is better than my ipod, or some other music store might be better is pretty much irrelevant. I’m stuck unless I feel like giving up a weekend to convert? Isn’t that a powerful incentive against innovation?

2

Richard Campbell 05.02.06 at 1:49 pm

“the main reason why hackers aren’t interested in breaking FairPlay isn’t because it would be difficult, but because it’s unnecessary. There is a very well known security hole in Apple’s system – you can burn your music to an unprotected CD, and then make mp3s, Ogg Vorbis files or whatever to your heart’s content.”

There is already a program, JHymn, that promises to “Set your iTunes music free • Remove DRM restrictions without loss of sound quality • Convert AAC to high-quality MP3”

3

Slocum 05.02.06 at 2:04 pm

Apple seems to have done what antitrust authorities on both sides of the Atlantic have failed dismally to do – to make it more difficult for record companies to collude in setting prices and reap the ensuing oligopoly profits.

I don’t buy that. What has made it impossible for record companies to set high prices is MP3 file sharing and CD copying along with intense competition from other forms of entertainment. It is almost impossible to sell a 1-hour disc of music for $15.99 now that most 2-hour DVDs go for around $10 (and even new blockbuster releases are $15-$20).

4

Slocum 05.02.06 at 2:12 pm

Oh, and BTW — does anybody think this would law would have been considered if it were Archos (a French MP3 player manufacturer) rather than Apple dominating the player and online music market? That seems to me to be the interesting thing here — to what extent are European anti-trust actions really trade actions by other means (which question also applies to Microsoft’s ongoing battles with the EU).

5

Uncle Kvetch 05.02.06 at 2:22 pm

The article itself is hardly surprising: If the bottom line wasn’t “Those stupid French are being stupid again,” it wouldn’t be the NY Times.

As for the price argument, am I alone in finding the iTunes store seriously overpriced? I get most of my music from eMusic, which is limited to independent labels but for which I pay about 22 cents a track (I could pay even less if I chose to make a year-long committment). If I want something that’s not available on eMusic, I’d rather buy a CD for $12-13 (typical price at my friendly neighborhood independent record store) and have the physical item, complete with artwork, lyrics, etc., than pay $9.99 for nothing but Apple’s proprietary AAC files.

I’m a huge Apple fan in most respects–I own an iPod and I just bought a new “Intel Core” iMac–but the iTunes store doesn’t strike me as one of their better innovations.

6

yabonn 05.02.06 at 2:24 pm

See? It must the reason i’m not a famous blogger, talent apart.

When i read something beggining with “many experts wondering (as ever): What has possessed the French?)“, i stop really reading, and just play DTV.

It’s originally Distance To Vichy : the number of paragraphs (for blogs, you count in comments) before Vichy is evoked.

The name remains but, due to abundance and variety of the material, the rules have quickly been loosened : you can count too the “french = surrender monkeys” hints, or any stripe of this trendy racism against the french.

15, big score for the Apple-fanboi : he makes lots of paragraphs.

7

gwangung 05.02.06 at 2:39 pm

Doesn’t tying the Ipod to ITunes create a barrier to entry to the market? Sure, there’s a big security hole, but not so big that I can easily switch to another mp3 player. The idea that some other player is better than my ipod, or some other music store might be better is pretty much irrelevant. I’m stuck unless I feel like giving up a weekend to convert?

Convert what? Most people store the majority of their music from their own CDs on their iPods…and most of them rip as MP3s, which doesn’t need converting.

8

paul 05.02.06 at 3:42 pm

richard campbell, the last version of jhymn I tried didn’t work in iTunes 6.whatever I have.

As for the pricing, where do you suppose the 99 cent price came from? Does anyone think Apple cares if a track costs a penny or a dime more or less than that? Their music store doesn’t exist to sell individual tracks, but to sell digital music and the players that you use.

I don’t know why Apple is the villain here: members of the RIAA cartel has openly griped about the low prices and expressed frustation that the licensing agreement with Apple set the price too low. But somehow Apple is to blame because the money goes to them first, before the lion’s share gets passed through to the RIAA members, the same clowns who couldn’t organize a drinking contest in a brewery.

Read this story for more details. There is a suit filed by some artists who are being denied royalties based on how their record company treats the transactions: the difference hinged on royalties paid against licenses vs sales. Sony, in this case, claims the transactions are sales, while anyone familiar with iTunes is aware it’s actually a licensing scheme. The use of DRM to limit distribution should make that clear.

9

Jack 05.02.06 at 3:51 pm

In the UK, the biggest music vendor is Woolworths. Stock is kept to a minimum and is virtually all supplied by the big four record companies. Woolworths take the majority of the selling price so that record companies in fact make more from an album sold on iTunes than they do from a CD. The challenge for the record companies is to justify the floorspace devoted to their product in the face of competition from DVDs, games etc. Their reward for succeeding is market share and relative security for their business.

iTunes is in competition with bricks and mortar distributors rather than the record companies but record companies favour bricks and mortar because it is currently still a bigger market and for fear of the “long tail”. With everyone shopping at what is effectively an enormous music shop, the advantage of control of the distribution channel evaporates and much of what the record companies do for acts evaporates. The next Arctic Monkeys or Sway might find a way of going more directly or cheaply to iTunes or some old fashinoned music might become very popular because of some TV ad say and all the production of videos and the shelf stacking in Woolworths will be to no avail. That would drastically change the relatinship between artists and record company. It may already have happened with Gnarls Barkely.

In effect the record companies are in the situation Compaq was in, it’s just not clear who is Dell.

Both iPods and the iTunes music store started in existing markets with no special advantage. iTMS and the iPod have made selling music online viable and their close integration has facilitated that — if they had had to be open from the get go would it have worked so well? At some point the integration might do more harm than good but how to tell when? Windows offers a good parallel and has been allowed to go significantly further without inerference. Nobody has forced Microsoft to make Windows run Apple or Unix programs. I don’t think there is a universal principle here and certainly not one that can ignore the IP protection of music while enforcing openness on iTMS.

10

ben wolfson 05.02.06 at 4:08 pm

isn’t because it would be difficult, but because it’s unnecessary. There is a very well known security hole in Apple’s system – you can burn your music to an unprotected CD, and then make mp3s, Ogg Vorbis files or whatever to your heart’s content.

Of course there’s a degradation in quality here as a result of transcoding (lossy AAC -> wav -> probably some other lossy format). You could rip your tracks to flac, of course, but the reason jhymn is useful is that it removes the crippling from your crippled AAC files without degrading the quality.

11

agm 05.02.06 at 4:09 pm

economists have very considerable difficulty in coming up with convincing arguments about the appropriate level of protection necessary to encourage innovation.
Perhaps true, but rather unrelated to what is actually happening. The problems is that, as far as anyone knows factually, Apple is basically using iTunes to sell iPods and letting the profit go to the labels.

Second, Goolsbee claims that sharing codes would make it easier for hackers to break FairPlay. This seems to me to be even less convincing.
So you’re not running linux or don’t care about using your not-an-iPod with iTunes. Fair enough, but not everyone feels that way.

It’s forced the record labels to commoditize albums by selling them at a price which is considerably lower than the price that the record companies would prefer – given sagging sales of CDs, the labels have had little choice but to accede to Apple’s terms.
Oh really? The accession to Apple’s terms are based on the fact that Apple built a new profit stream, one which from the labels’ point of view doesn’t exist apart from sufficiently strong DRM. Well, that, and the fact that all previous online ventures were at best marginal. The combination of making money while locking down one’s wares to the average consumer is an opportunity that seems to be attractive to the music industry.

12

sciurus 05.02.06 at 4:12 pm

Convert what? Most people store the majority of their music from their own CDs on their iPods…and most of them rip as MP3s, which doesn’t need converting.

If I had to guess, I’d say people store mostly pirated MP3s, not rips of their own CDs, on their iPods, but that’s a seperate problem. The problem of the iPod and iTunes Music Store arises from two related facts: Apple refuses to license their DRM or implement anyone else’s DRM.

This means if I own an iPod, I can’t buy major-label music anywhere besides Apple’s music store. If I buy music from Apple, I can’t play it on anything besides Apple software (iTunes) or hardware (iPod). Forever. You may think you’re not trapped because you can burn and re-rip the songs you buy, but keep in mind that you don’t actually own the music you pay for through iTunes, and Apple can change what you’re allowed to do with it anytime they want. In the USA, attempting to bypass those restrictions, even for fair, use, is illegal under the DMCA. Face it, DRM is scary.

There are two great posts about the original French law from Bernard Lang and Ed Felten. Downhill Battle explains how artists still get shafted under iTunes pricing scheme.

13

PLN 05.02.06 at 4:38 pm

Goolsbee, and most of the commentary here, is missing the point. *This bill is not about iTunes*. That’s all a sideshow. The main point of the bill is to implement a French DMCA: making it *illegal* to break digital locks. Even if digital locks were good things, that doesn’t mean breaking them should be illegal. The iTunes stuff is just a clumsy, statist attempt to mitigate the massively anticompetitive consequences of the rest of the law.

If the US were implementing a treaty that would make make mandatory professional licensure for all occupations, but as part of the implementing legislation inserted a clause regulating professional associations so that their membership standards were transparent to everyone, and you were to write an editorial blasting Congress for its interference with the free market, would you complain about the way the law destroys the right to pursue a livelihood without asking permission, or would you complain about the burden of transparency on membership groups’ free association? The latter, it seems, if you’re Austan Goolsbee.

More here and elsewhere.

14

mack 05.02.06 at 5:02 pm

It’s not software iTunes “codes” that they want to open, whatever those would be, but the source code for iTunes’ and other DRM systems.
The difference seems small but is actually quite significant. Software “codes” sound like numbers. Source code is the actual instructions that make up the program.

15

Jon H 05.02.06 at 7:43 pm

“What has made it impossible for record companies to set high prices is MP3 file sharing and CD copying along with intense competition from other forms of entertainment. It is almost impossible to sell a 1-hour disc of music for $15.99 now that most 2-hour DVDs go for around $10 (and even new blockbuster releases are $15-$20).”

And you honestly think they wouldn’t keep trying?

CD prices haven’t dropped much, if at all. I’m quite sure the record companies would like jack up the price of a track on iTunes to $2 or $3.

16

Maynard Handley 05.02.06 at 11:53 pm

“Doesn’t tying the Ipod to ITunes create a barrier to entry to the market?”

Ignoring the ITMS music store issue, the tying you are presumably talking about here is Apple’s use of AAC. Except, guess what, AAC is an open standard. You can buy the spec and implement it yourself. Yes, you will have to pay patent royalties, but you are also supposed to do that for MP3. The same is just as true of the H264 video spec, as used on iPod video.

The fact that most of the non-Apple digital music players out there support WMA and none of them support AAC is yet more proof that the people running these companies are complete retards. The only way they are going to get converts from the existing customer base (which is what, 75%+ iPod) is by providing AAC, but rather than actually looking at the market and their would-be-customers, they continue to believe that Microsoft is somehow relevant and that people really want from the music player is the ability to listen to TV stations and take photographs, as opposed to, you know, listening to music without hassles.

And it’s not like Apple is perfect. I am interested in using my iPod pretty much exclusively for spoken word content, something Apple does well but not spectacularly. If Samsung or Rio or whoever stopped flailing around long enough to produce a truly good spoken word audio player, I’d be very interested in buying it. But step 1 in that process is to recognize certain realities, like that I and most consumers have at least some (and in my case a whole lot) of AAC content, so any player we buy damn well better support it.

17

Peter Hollo 05.03.06 at 9:12 am

But Maynard, AAC is an open standard, but DRM’d AAC files can’t be played in any software other than iTunes, and can’t be played on any hardware mp3 players other than iPods.
So if I want another mp3 player for other reasons (say, I want one that actually records decently as well, or I want one with decent sound maybe), then I’m locked out of using the iTunes Music Store.
And if I don’t like iTunes (because as far as I’m concerned it’s bloody awful software on the PC), then ditto.

The iTunes Music Store does screw artists (I’m a muso myself), but only as much as the record companies want to screw their artists. As far as I’m concerned the real trouble with iTMS is that it screws the customers, and mostly the customers don’t realise it. Mostly people buying tracks from the store don’t even realise that they then won’t be able to load them onto their mobile phones or their non-iPod mp3 players. But this is why most people do assume that the store is all about selling more iPods. Which would be fine if (other than being quite pretty, and impressively slim) iPods weren’t kinda crap.

On top of this, the compression that iTunes uses is really pretty crap quality. So paying what ends up at really quite close to CD price for a downloaded album on iTunes is pretty absurd when you’re getting nothing approaching CD quality. In this sense, I feel the pricing on iTunes is still too expensive.
What’s more, artists (and labels) can’t choose to sell better quality files. You’re locked into iTunes’ 128k DRM’d AAC files (if you want to sell your wares on iTunes that is).

18

paul 05.03.06 at 1:09 pm

FYI: Apple just renewed its contracts with the major labels at 99 cents/track, even as the cartel grumbled about “losing revenue.” As if they were making any money in digital sales/licensing before?

The Seattle Times: Business & Technology: Apple deal keeps 99-cent iTunes:

Apple deal keeps 99-cent iTunesBy Connie GuglielmoBloomberg NewsApple Computer renewed contracts with the four largest record companies to continue offering songs at 99 cents each through the iTunes music store, a victory for Apple Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs, who’s been fighting music-company attempts to change pricing and charge more for some songs.EMI, Sony BMG, Universal and Warner agreed to continue selling their music through iTunes, Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris said in an e-mailed statement. She declined to provide details on the length or other terms of the contracts.Warner CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. in September said demand should dictate prices. Jobs said some record companies were being “greedy” and that higher music prices might prompt users to illegally download songs.”This is a very big win for Apple,” Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Jupiter Research in New York, said. “It validates Apple’s position that 99 cents is a sweet spot for songs.”Shares of Apple rose $2.02 to $71.62 Tuesday. They have almost doubled in the past year.Amanda Conroy, a spokeswoman for EMI, and Sony BMG spokesman John McKay declined to comment. Digital music sales tripled last year to $1.1 billion as consumers downloaded 420 million tracks, boosting digital receipts to 6 percent of the music industry’s revenue as record companies combat an overall sales slump.

A $1.1 billion market and they — the RIAA cartel — do what to earn that?

19

Maynard Handley 05.03.06 at 2:17 pm

Peter Hollo, which part of “Ignoring the ITMS music store issue, the tying you are presumably talking about here is Apple’s use of AAC.”
did you not undestand?
I said in the first freaking sentence that I was NOT discussing DRM issues, that I was interested in discussing other issues.

You are welcome to say what you want about DRM, but don’t make some claim about how my post does or does not agree with or lead in to your rant.
…….

“But Maynard, AAC is an open standard, but DRM’d AAC files can’t be played in any software other than iTunes, and can’t be played on any hardware mp3 players other than iPods.”

……..

You also do not help your case by stating “On top of this, the compression that iTunes uses is really pretty crap quality.”
The “compression that iTunes uses” is one of MP3 at a variety of bit rates, AAC at a variety of bit rates, and Apple Lossless. Apple Lossless is, of course, lossless, while AAC at 192kbps has been shown in a variety of tests to be pretty damn good. If your complaint is with the quality of the audio as encoded by the ITUNES MUSIC STORE, say that. My understanding is that independent tests (not as rigorous as those applied during the development of AAC, but, still, double-blind and all that) consider the quality of iTMS to be pretty good, but heck, I’m quite prepared to change my opinion based on a guy who can’t understand the first point of the post I just wrote, and who apparently has no idea of the difference between iTunes (the program), iPods (a piece of hardware) and the iTMS (an internet retail operation).

……………

But, of course, it is the overall tone of your post that is funniest. Very much Annie Hall’s “The food is awful, and the portions so small”. You start off complaining that customers using iTMS are trapped into using the iPod which you think sucks, then go on to tell us that iTMS itself sucks.
So why exactly do you care? Why don’t you ignore both iTMS and iPod and go use Rhapsody or Napster or whatever your favorite service is?

20

Peter Hollo 05.03.06 at 6:10 pm

Well, ok Maynard, I admittedly ignored your caveat about iTMS, but I’m not sure the original commenter was differentiating clearly between the player and store either. Most people talking about “buying a track from iTunes”, and I think it’s probably to Apples advantage that the store and the player are conflated in people’s minds. Look at the original quote. It’s only in context that you can see it’s mostly (but not always) meaning “iTMS” when it says “iTunes”.

And so of course I was talking in my last paragraph about the compression that the iTunes music store uses. I’m sorry you missed that, presumably because I was erroneously addressing you.

I’m happy to ignore the iTMS and ignore iPods. On the other hand, from the point of view of much of the music industry (both consumers and more importantly musicians, my peers), iTunes seems to be seen as “the place you go” to buy music, rather than do that evil filesharing thing.
So I’m going to have to make my band’s music available on iTunes, and although it’ll also be available from my site without DRM, most people won’t realise that there’s a difference.

Apologies, Maynard – I was only half replying to you. Mostly I was ranting about iTunes’ “quasi-monopoly” as Henry puts it, which is possible more important in “cultural” terms than in strictly economic terms: because the other stores (Rhapsody, Napster, Yahoo or whatever) don’t have the range of iTunes, people are more likely to lock themselves into iTMS — because by using iTMS, you are locked into using an iPod/iTunes (the player), on which you can’t use the DRM’d files from other services (at least that’s true of iPods, not sure about iTunes).

In that respect – because of the way “iTunes’s” “quasi-monopoly” actually works – it is profoundly anti-competitive. Apple are adding more features to their iPods, but play anyone the music from my iAudio X5 and they’ll understand the difference in sound quality (both the files and more importantly the player itself), and frankly I don’t care about video capabilities (yet).

On the other hand, I’m not sure legislating against Apples’ practices is the way to go either. Helpful, hey?

21

Peter Hollo 05.03.06 at 6:11 pm

(missing apostrophe in “Apples advantage”, ick.)

22

Maynard Handley 05.03.06 at 10:03 pm


I’m happy to ignore the iTMS and ignore iPods. On the other hand, from the point of view of much of the music industry (both consumers and more importantly musicians, my peers), iTunes seems to be seen as “the place you go” to buy music, rather than do that evil filesharing thing.
So I’m going to have to make my band’s music available on iTunes, and although it’ll also be available from my site without DRM, most people won’t realise that there’s a difference.

(1) iTMS *is* the place to go if you want to buy music. Isn’t the point of filesharing that you *don’t* buy? :-)

(2) More seriously, you seem to be claiming that iTMS forces people to be charged for music even though you don’t want them to be, and that it forces the music to be DRMd, and that it forces the music to be 128kbps AAC.

I don’t know anything about the music business, but I suspect that all of those can be changed if you want them to be. There are certainly free music downloads available on iTMS, and there are podcasts and non-podcast lectures (like those from Stanford) on iTMS for free, with no DRM, using either AAC or mp3, and at a variety of bitrates. At the very least, I don’t see what’s to stop you creating a podcast feed named after your band, whose individual podcast “episodes” are your songs, but perhaps one can do better than that.

(3) You really need to focus your arguments better. What you are really arguing against is DRM in general. Well fine, we all hate DRM. But singling out Apple’s implementation of DRM as uniquely evil (as opposed to WMA, whatever Rhapsody and Real use, and Sony’s constanly morphing crap, all of which are even more hostile to consumers and even more painful to use), and going on about AAC as though it were some proprietary Apple format that they prevent anyone else from using, are not helpful.

23

Peter Hollo 05.04.06 at 4:02 am

Sorry Henry for the (relative) hijacking of your thread. I don’t intend to post anymore, but just one more response:

(1) My point is that there are (and ought to be) lots of places where you go to buy music downloads. iTMS garners its “monopoly” via various means, but mainly (I think) because Apple also have the large part of the market share in hardware mp3 players, and AFAIK the only DRM’d music downloads you can play on iPods are from iTMS. In any case, that means iTMS is the default place to go.
Given that, we artists are somewhat tied in to making our stuff available there… But whatever.

(2) Sure, there are free downloads from iTMS, but that’s irrelevant. I’m pretty much certain you’re wrong about artists having a choice as far as formats, DRM, etc. I will be looking into this soon for my band, so I’ll be interested to find out if I’m wrong.

(3) Sure I’m arguing against DRM in general, and by no means is Apple’s implementation uniquely evil. But it ties into point 1: Apple are seen as the default, having what Henry called a “quasi-monopoly”, and therefore their DRM has more of an impact. It has an impact because it is in some ways invisible to the unwashed masses, who usually don’t realise that they don’t own the music they’ve bought in approximately the same way they own the CDs on their shelves.

I’m interested in where you think I’m going on about AAC as if etc etc. I was explicitly talking about DRM’d AAC files in my first post, and didn’t mention them at all in the second.
Please read my first post again keeping in mind that the iTunes/iTMS conflation is all-pervasive (it’s clearly there in the quotation in Henry’s original post, and it’s probably the source of your confusion with regards to the first comment too).
But there’s probably little point replying again because I think we’re partly talking at cross-purposes and I don’t wish to hijack Crossed Timber for our discussion any more. Thanks all ;)

24

Peter Hollo 05.04.06 at 5:35 am

(That’s “Crooked Timber”. Boy oh boy, the typos they are haunting me!)

25

Jon H 05.05.06 at 12:01 am

Um, Peter, if you don’t like DRM, and would like to provide non-DRM’d mp3s at an encoding of your choice, then it seems to me that ITMS is a non-issue, is it not?

Unless, that is, you want to take advantage of the market access and visibility your music would have on ITMS, which would be unavailable if you put your music on your own website for free download. Or on another, much less popular music download service.

Which is to say, at its core your complaint is actually a marketing issue – you are free to provide music that iPod users can listen to, without DRM, but that would require that your music be in places with much less traffic, likely reducing your exposure.

I kinda doubt iTunes demands exclusive distribution agreements with every act that signs up. It would be easy enough for you to put your music up on iTunes, as DRM’d AACs, while providing them in formats you prefer on other sites and services, which you could link to on your website, assuming you have one.

Anyone interested enough to buy your music off iTunes would probably do a Google search in short order, which would lead to your website, and thus they’d find other sources for your music.

26

Peter Hollo 05.05.06 at 12:38 am

Jon, I agree with everything you say except the last paragraph (and what we will be doing is described in your para 3). I’d love to believe your last paragraph too, but it seems to me that a lot of people will have automatically search for an artist’s music on iTMS and just get it from there without going looking for the artist’s own website and thus learning they can purchase it there – much less, realising that they’re doing themselves a disservice by getting the music from iTMS rather than direct from the band.

You’re right, iTMS rarely have exclusive distribution agreements. My point, such that it is, is that the quasi-monopoly that Apple/iTunes/iPod/iTMS enjoy means that for a lot of people “buying music online” practically equals “buying music from iTMS”. As Maynard says, “iTMS is the place to go if you want to buy music.” Except it’s not “the” place, is it? It’s just one place. However, the marketing realities are such that you kinda have to provide your music there.
Given that, it’s a shame that what customers get is not only encumbered with DRM (I guess that’s to be expected), but with DRM that ties users into using particular hardware and software, and ties artists (I think) into using particular types of compression.

(We do have a website, but I don’t want to seem to be promoting the band here – just discussing the issues. It’s linked from my blog, FWIW)

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