Supporting DRM-Free Music

blog
41

Jeff,

What if Microsoft said to HP: “The only version of Windows that allowed to sell with your PCs is this version without IE and Windows Explorer and Media Player. We’re going to let Dell (and maybe some of your other competitors) sell the full versions, with no problems, just not you.” How quickly do you think the trustbusters/Justice Department/lawyers would have Microsoft in court? How would you feel if it happened to you?

If the labels are discriminating against Apple so blatantly then that’s Just Plain Wrong - anti-competitive behaviour, possibly even collusion and certainly bad for competition.

Apple’s DRM may be slightly restrictive, but it’s vastly better than anything the RIAA and the record labels have come up with, and it managed to do DRM while still users some measure of freedom. Why should we punish Apple because it figured out how to balance the desires of consumers with the restrictions the record companies wanted? If Apple could offer the same DRM-free tracks as Amazon, wouldn’t the users ultimately be the winners?

Apple gave us DRM we can live with. And a pretty good iTunes experience. And good music players too. And stuck it to the record labels. Don’t they deserve a bit of credit?

43

Don’t you love the wonderful:

Please note that Amazon MP3 is currently only available to US customers.

For a lot of us, iTunes is the only decent option of getting any downloadable music at all. And given the fact that we had to wait a whole extra year before iTunes became available here, that means I’ll be out of luck for another couple of months with Amazon. If they’ll ever remove that line.

But this isn’t a problem with Amazon and music only. The internet is global, but shopping is still largely local. Quite a frustrating experience for non-US customers, at times.

44

"Well, there’s your problem, right there… :)"
hehe :slight_smile: Yeah, but the thing is… that’s the one thing that’s pretty much unchangeable. I tried, I really did, but britney really doesn’t come close to evergrey :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

45

Also, on the iTunes front - Steve Jobs Co keep approximately 50% of all profits on each AAC track they sell.

I wouldn’t be so sure about that – the numbers I’ve heard tossed about are much lower. If you have a source on the 50% number, please share.

46

Unfair? Unfair to whom? The customers who are getting DRM-free music officially blessed by the major record labels?

Unfair to both the customer, who can’t benefit from competing music stores – as there is no competition – and unfair to Apple who is not allowed to fairly compete with Amazon (and the rest of the world is hosed anyway, as the Amazon Music Store is only available in the US, so the only un-drm’d music stores for us europeans or oceanians are iTunes plus, good ol’ CD and our PirateBay friends).

Reg’s view that it’s unfair, like it or not, is objective. It’s not in any way, shape or form “Apple advocacy” (had that post come from DF it may have been, but Reg, is that a joke?).

Before the iPod, portable music meant CD players

It didn’t. Before the iPod, portable music meant unusable interface and ugly brick, but there were HDD and even flash music players long before the iPod.

Really? Odd, then, how OS X requires specific hardware to run. That’s one bit of DRM they seem quite willing to carry forward.

It’s also a completely different one (and it’s wrong anyway, OS X doesn’t require specific hardware to run): in the computer market, Apple is a systems vendor, their software is here to sell their hardware, and the other way around. That’s not the case in the music market, and Apple repeatedly stated they’d switch everything to un-DRM’d if they could. It’s just that the labels won’t let them have Amazon’s deal.

Hell, Reg explained it perfectly well, you’re more than a bit lacking in objectivity here jeff.

47

Just to agree with some of the commenters above, I read Reg’s article first and I didn’t get the impression that he was supporting Apple so much as objectively describing the current situation.

48

argh US only. Why the hell are distribution contracts so messed up? My current options are either iTunes or BitTorrent. Which is something that NBC should have considered when they pulled out of iTunes and set up yet another US-only portal. Customers will go down the path of least resistance. (sorry I realize this is slightly OT, but I had my hopes up for a second there before I read the fine print)

49

After getting burned by MSN Music’s DRM music files not playing on my computer after a processor upgrade and not being allowed to Authorize/Deauthorize any new PCs, I have sworn off DRMed music. Amazon MP3 DRM free downloads are my format of choice. fairly high bit rate without the DRM leaves me asking if I will ever purchase an actual CD again. I’m not an audiophile (I’m a convenience-phile) so digitally re-coded music isn’t an issue with me.

Seems like the people who played by the rules and bought DRM music (I could have easily downloaded those same songs on Kazaa) are the ones who got screwed by it. The people who ripped a friend’s CD to their MP3 player don’t have any of the problems I had.

50

I’ve been holding off commenting on this because I wanted to make sure I had my thoughts in order first – first a bit of background. I have been using iTunes since v1.0 came out in early 2001. I have bought a number of iPods and iPhones over the years, starting with a iPod mini when they came out. I’ve been using OS X since the Public Beta days, and I also use Linux and Windows regularly. I first downloaded MP3s back in late 1996/early 1997 and have been listening to all of my music through the “MP3 filter*” for about 7 years now.

I think there is a number of misconceptions that have been tossed out over the years about iTunes and Apple:

1 - Apple is pro DRM/anti consumer
2 - iTunes locks users into the iPod
3 - Apple uses proprietary formats to lock users into iTunes

It seems as every time these are tossed out, it’s always from someone who hasn’t used Apple products before. Or if they have, it was when they were in school, many years ago, on an Apple II+.

Anyway, I think what would be helpful is that people separate a few concepts here. One is that just because Apple is dominating the portable music market right now doesn’t mean they are being anti-competitive like other companies (Microsoft, RIAA). If people would take an objective look at Apple’s products, they would see the reason they are dominating the market is because in general, they are putting out the better product. Hands down. And by product, I don’t just mean the hardware, I mean the software on both the iPod and iTunes as well.

Also, another thing to separate is that the behavior of Apple in regards to DRM is not necessarily due to Apple deciding that DRM is a good thing. Remember, they have to license the music from the RIAA to offer it on the iTMS. Saying that Apple wants DRM because it locks customers into iPods has no basis in reality – the truth is Apple offers music with DRM because if they hadn’t, they wouldn’t have had much of a store in the first place.

An aside – with the ease that Apple’s DRM scheme can be broken, I would argue that it’s not even likely to be a factor in locking someone into an iPod. To the above poster who switched to Linux – why didn’t you burn the music to CDs first and re-rip them? Or maybe even do some digging around on the net to find other ways to defeat FairPlay?

If people want to accuse Apple of locking consumers in, then what they are really saying is that when a company listens to their customers and offers a product that meets their needs, they must be doing something wrong because it locks customers in. If Apple stopped using iTunes, or changed for the worse the way you interact with the iPod, or made their DRM so tough that I couldn’t use it, I would start shopping around for alternatives. But Apple keeps innovating and resisting pressure from the RIAA and others to add more DRM to their products. I really wish I could point to another company that has my needs in mind when it comes to music.

dennis

  • Meaning that everything I listen to has been first compressed to MP3 or AAC before burned to a CD, loaded onto an iPod, played through iTunes or the stereo.
51

I don’t see how the record companies letting Amazon sell DRM-free music at the same time as requiring that Apple keep DRM on the music that they sell, as anything /but/ unfair on Apple and ultimately on the consumer. While the recording industry tries to control Apple, we lose out. Jobs has already stated on record (heh, sorry) that he would remove all DRM from the iTunes store if the labels would agree to it.

And as no-one else has mentioned it yet - the 5-computers limit on the Apple iTunes purchases is 5 simultaneous computers, not 5 for all-time. Just thought I’d mention this as I’ve seen it in a few places and many people do seem to think that once you’ve authorised 5 computers it’s game over. You can de-authorise computers; I’m on my 4th Mac, I have 2 machines in current use and have 3 authorisations available to me at the moment. All of my Macs were authorised when I was using them. When it’s time to move the machine along, I just deauthorise that computer from my Apple account.

52

Hey, i just gave you a decent chunk of change for that mp3 link :). I NEVER knew amazon had an MP3 store.

Jeff, again, you are amazing!

53

smucks.

http://www.demonbaby.com/blog/2007/10/when-pigs-fly-death-of-oink-birth-of.html

which.cd did I hear ?

54

Record companies letting Amazon sell DRM-free music at the same time as requiring that Apple keep DRM on the music that they sell, as anything /but/ unfair on Apple

As a consumer, why would I care about anything other than competition resulting in lower prices – and less DRM – for me? Why would I care how “unfairly” a company with a 160 billion dollar market cap (as of this writing) is being treated?

It’s competition. It’s business. Business is war, and as long as the consumer benefits, the system is working as designed. AAPL is a big company. They don’t need my or your moral support to succeed. They have plenty of great products. I’m sure there are millions of consumers who could care less if there is DRM on their music as long as it works on their iPods.

It’s not in any way, shape or form “Apple advocacy”

It is when you explicitly put the concerns of a 160 billion dollar company ahead of the typical music consumer.

Unfair to both the customer, who can’t benefit from competing music stores – as there is no competition

Was there viable competition for digital music downloads before Amazon? No, there wasn’t. So in effect this has created the only real competition there ever would be. Without Amazon DRM-free, iTunes was well on its way to becoming utterly dominant and entrenched, the de-facto standard for the forseeable future.

Would Apple have reduced iTunes Plus fees from $1.29 to $0.99 if Amazon didn’t offer DRM free music for less? Out of the goodness of their heart? Because they love, in Reg’s words, “delighting customers”?

It’s actually much simpler than this: the record labels realized that the DRM they asked for from Apple wasn’t protecting them or the artists at all, but in fact, protecting the Apple iPod lock-in model. The labels had no choice but to permanently destroy DRM to regain distribution control of their own music. A pyrrhic victory, to be sure, and it couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch of folks.

The enemy of my enemy (DRM) is my friend.

55

Wow, so many readers who feel “dis-enfranchised” by the direction of Jeff’s blog…

Could it be that the same criticism he leveled at his (now) new partner, Joel, http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000679.html , can now be applied to him?

I just couldn’t resist: http://www.burch-swm.com/misc.html

I’m not hatin’ Jeff, but you do open yourself up to some of this :slight_smile:

56

I’ve been beating the anti-DRM drum for years now. Many of my friends blindly go on buying from iTS in spite of my repeated rants to the contrary. Ugh. Lemmings.

I continue to purchase CDs then rip them to MP3 format. It’s a control thing. And it’s a backup thing! Hard drives may be more reliable than ever before, but they still die and very few computer owners ever do comprehensive backups. So, if your hard drive goes belly up and you’ve lost all of that music you’ve paid to download, what then?

57

Buy a CD: higher quality, no DRM.

58

I completely agree with you Jeff; I don’t buy anything from itunes since I got for mistake DRM-ed songs (it was the first time for me on that site and there was no clear evidence that those songs were DRM-ed, call it lack of transparency…). Unluckyly here in Italy we don’t have the luck of having amazon’s service so at the moment we can’t do like you.
I hope the future will be better, best we can do for now is to avoid buying from itunes-store.

59

Quote:
As a consumer, why would I care about anything other than competition resulting in lower prices – and less DRM – for me? Why would I care how “unfairly” a company with a 160 billion dollar market cap (as of this writing) is being treated?

Because there is no competition involved, and the labels are manipulating the market at will. Exercise: as a consumer, why should you care about companies selling products at below production costs (hint: it has something to do with sustaining the competition in the future)?

Quote:
The labels realized they had to permanently destroy DRM to regain distribution control of their own music.

Nobody destroyed DRM. The labels can stop giving non-DRMed music to Amazon any moment that they feel secure in having more than 1 highly successful middleman for DRMed music. And if Apple is discriminated against heavily enough, there will be competitors in that market sector before long.

60

From Ars Technica:

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080110-amazon-rounds-out-drm-free-music-offering-with-sony-bmg.html

Amazon rounds out DRM-free music offering with Sony BMG

Probably fuming at the news is Steve Jobs, who has been hammering the labels to let iTunes be the first to offer their music DRM-free.

But the labels have apparently been playing hardball with Apple, and have all (but one) decided to take their unprotected music elsewhere. It’s not an accident that EMI and a handful of independent labels are the only ones selling DRM-free music through iTunes right now—the labels are actively trying to lessen Apple’s influence in digital music.

61

I thnk you’re a bit naive on this one Jeff - Apple would love to offer DRM-free music from all labels (see http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/), it’s the labels that are preventing it.