This bit from a NYT “article”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/19/business/19itunes.html?ex=1247889600&en=448e05e01713ce82&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland on iTunes struck me as a particularly noteworthy example of the regurgitated press-release masquerading as analysis.
bq. Sometime before the end of the year, Microsoft is expected to begin its push into the music download business. Microsoft will attempt to catch up with Apple by deploying its new Windows technology, called Windows Media Digital Rights Management, that will let users more easily transfer song collections from their personal computers to their portable MP3 players.
“Freedom is Slavery”:http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/g/georgeorwe141783.html how are ya. “Media DRM 10”:http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/drm/default.aspx has nothing whatsoever to do with making it easier for users to transfer their song collections, and everything to do with making sure that they don’t do things with their song collections that the record companies wouldn’t like them to do. In other words, it’ll make transferring music harder, not easier – if it makes it easier than it already is, then it’s not doing the job that it’s supposed to do. I suppose that you could make some class of a contorted argument that DRM will make record companies happier to flog tunes for portable players etc etc, but that isn’t what the journalist is saying. Sloppy work.
{ 18 comments }
Kieran Healy 07.21.04 at 12:15 am
In related news, Microsoft’s forthcoming patch for Windows XP will make it easier for worm and virus writers to transfer their work to your computer.
reader 07.21.04 at 12:41 am
Good source for news on related topics is http://www.corante.com/copyfight/
Matt McIrvin 07.21.04 at 1:36 am
…And it isn’t necessarily for MP3 players, it’s for Windows Media players, just as the iTunes DRM is for AAC-with-iTunes-DRM players.
Matt McIrvin 07.21.04 at 1:40 am
Incidentally, I think that Apple’s greatest innovation here was their pricing structure, which instantly became an industry standard for online a la carte music sales. Even some bands selling MP3s directly to fans have imitated it. It could be argued that it’s still too high, but it seems to be about right to move some product.
Mike Kozlowski 07.21.04 at 2:39 am
I believe the way that paragraph makes sense is if you read it as saying “makes it easier for users to transfer DRMed files, like the ones they buy on those stupid iTunes-style stores (but especially ones rented from subscription services), to their portable devices.”
perianwyr 07.21.04 at 2:52 am
Matt: Apple’s biggest innovation was not their pricing structure- but you’re close. Their biggest innovation was to insist with an iron, unyielding will upon this one element:
Music bought on iTunes will be of one price. Furthermore, there will be no jiggery-pokery of “no burn”, “listen 3 times”, “lasts a week”, or other bizarre licensing arrangements. Everything is the same.
If you get record companies into a deal with you, what they’ll do is sit around and try to wrench every perceived dime out of the music venture. This includes effectively hanging the venture by the neck so that you can re-use the air in its metaphorical lungs. Apple was smart enough to put the kibosh on that.
Zak Catem 07.21.04 at 2:53 am
Can anyone point me to a plausible scenario in which record companies might provide their intellectual property for online distribution without some sort of DRM in place to provide some built-in assurance that their legally granted rights will be protected?
ben wolfson 07.21.04 at 3:03 am
The problem with “music bought on iTunes shall be one price” is that the Necks, e.g., get screwed, since all their albums are one 1-hour track (or can you just sell the whole album, and not individual tracks? I don’t use iTunes so I dunno).
Alex R 07.21.04 at 3:28 am
Can anyone point me to a plausible scenario in which publishers like the New York Times or Dow Jones might provide their intellectual property for online distribution without some sort of DRM in place to provide some built-in assurance that their legally granted rights will be protected?
(Note, by the way, that the New York Times provides the same “intellectual property” on their website for free that they sell in their paper. Dow Jones, publishers of the Wall Street Journal, provides their articles only to paid subscribers, but does not protect them with any kind of “DRM”. Both the New York Times and Dow Jones, will, no doubt, take legal actions to protect their rights, as needed — and they don’t need any DRM to do so. And record companies have been happily providing their wares for years on these little silvery discs called “CDs” which, at least until recently, have lacked any form of DRM. They may complain that they aren’t selling as many of these “CDs” as they think they ought to be, but I don’t see them quitting the business — unless, that is, they can con the public into buying CD-like products that have been crippled with DRM.)
Brian Weatherson 07.21.04 at 3:30 am
Yep you can buy albums for between $8 and $14, usually $10. I’ve never seen songs longer than 7 or 8 minutes sold as individual tracks on iTunes. For instance on the latest Wilco album you can buy all the songs except the two 10+ minute songs as individual tracks – you only get those two if you give them $10 for the album. The Necks don’t actually have anything on iTunes, but they could easily enough do this.
Zak Catem 07.21.04 at 3:35 am
alex: Good points, but you have to remember that newspapers and magazines make the bulk of their money from advertising, so it isn’t really the same thing. The point about CDs is important, as it draws us to the question of why record companies were happy to release their music on unprotected CDs, but not on unprotected MP3s. Obviously there’s a difference in how these media are perceived in the industry.
Chuchundra 07.21.04 at 4:13 am
I can go the store right now (well, not right now, it’s 11PM) and buy non-DRMed RIAA product.
What’s the difference between that and downloading it?
If I want to share the music I bought in CD form, the process takes less than ten minutes. Pop in the CD, run CDEX, click a button and come back a few minutes later. Voila, ready for sharing.
The music industry is run by idiots.
Patrick Nielsen Hayden 07.21.04 at 5:56 am
“Sloppy work”
No, not sloppy at all, actually.
Alex R 07.21.04 at 11:25 am
A couple extra comments: When CDs were introduced in the early 80s, of course, the Internet was called ARPANET, had only a few thousand users, and “file sharing” meant handing a manila folder to someone else in your office. Obviously, no need for DRM was seen at this point.
Second, remember that once upon a time, “copy protection” was nearly universal on commercial PC software. Software was sold on floppy disks, and vendors would do stuff like hide data in non-standard locations on the disk so that standard disk copy routines could not copy them.
But consumers rebelled — they couldn’t make backup copies without buying special copy software designed to get around the vendor’s tricks, they had to have the original floppy disk when running the software, and so on. Copy protection pissed off computer users enough that after a while, *software vendors stopped using it*. Only more recently have vendors started to try to implement registration schemes — and when Intuit, maker of the popular US income tax preparation software TurboTax, tried it, they eventually had to back down.
Now maybe the recording and movie industries think that their consumers are less sophisticated than software purchasers, but the software industry provides a cautionary tale for anyone planning to add DRM.
Matt McIrvin 07.21.04 at 1:30 pm
It’s not quite true that everything is the same on iTunes. Some tracks can only be bought as part of an album (which is how they get around the 1-hour-track-for-a-dollar problem), and some albums do cost more than others.
But everything is much closer to being the same than with the other early attempts at per-track sales; the licensing restrictions on what you can do after getting the tracks are uniform (and not terribly onerous).
On the other hand, they are not necessarily constant in time. Apple tweaked the rules with the last iTunes revision: if I recall correctly, they slightly decreased the number of CD burns you could get from a playlist that included purchased songs, and slightly increased the number of computers you could authorize for streaming.
As for other comments above… record companies have in fact experimented with selling non-DRMed music online: emusic.com is or was a Vivendi Universal project, right?
And bands have sometimes sold them directly; to use my personal favorite example, They Might Be Giants just opened an online MP3 store a few days ago that uses the Apple pricing model, but sells non-DRMed music (there’s a long spiel there about how they’re trusting the fans not to abuse it). TMBG is a band with a long-time, respectful cult following, so this model might work better for them than for others.
Matt McIrvin 07.21.04 at 1:40 pm
…On the other side of the coin, while record companies were happy to release unprotected CDs back when it was difficult or impossible for most people to copy them, now the big guys are not happy about it at all, and are trying various harebrained schemes to copy-protect CDs, which seem to be meeting with some customer resistance. (Actually, precisely speaking, such discs are not CDs: Philips has said that it will try to enforce its trademark on the “Compact Disc” name and logo, and keep them off of these things.)
Matt McIrvin 07.21.04 at 1:47 pm
…And even back then they were irritated about home taping, and put forth the usual fanciful calculations about how much money it supposedly lost them.
Steve 07.21.04 at 2:54 pm
Zak: Certainly. eMusic used to provide entire bands’ and indie record labels’ catalogs on a subscription basis via un-DRMed MP3s. The labels’ theory seemed to be that Blonde Redhead and Amon Tobin could use the exposure and file trading wasn’t going to see file trading cut into their giant multiplatinum album sales because their g.m.a.s. didn’t exist. A lot of people used eMusic as a quasi-radio station, and it led to a lot of people discovering new bands; then eMusic changed the pricing model and most people I know dropped the service.
Comments on this entry are closed.