Slashdot Mirror
Steve Jobs and the State of Legal Music Downloads
An anonymous reader writes "Rolling Stone has published an interview with Steve Jobs about the current state of the music industry. He is a smart man, that guy. 'When we first went to talk to these record companies -- about eighteen months ago -- we said, "None of this technology that you're talking about's gonna work. We have Ph.D.s here who know the stuff cold, and we don't believe it's possible to protect digital content."'"
is to make it cool to buy it. Make it something people *want* to spend the $$$ on.
Exactly. The record companies need to see the added value that people experience by having the physical CD. Just because people can copy CDs, it doesn't mean they will. The same is true of DVDs.
it's just not posible to protect something from millions of hackers... i remember that XP supossed to be "hacker-proof" with the internet activation system... HACKED before even XP was officially released. The SONY protected audio CD's... with a permanent black marker.... it is a utopia to think that no one will try to break the protection... the harder they try to protect something the more challenging to hackers is breakin it.
Putting a windows cd backwards, plays evil messages, but it gets worse, putting it right, installs windows.
I've gt a buddy with a HUGE classic vinyl collection (lots of rare stuff) and the artwork is worth WAY more than the record itself. Maybe there's a parallel these guys can draw to offer something a little more tangible than the bits. Having a scan of artwork isn't the same as having a rip of the music.
Of course for that to work, they'd have to stop pumping out 500 godzillion copies of every single album made, which is a problem for them as well.
But it should common sense .... sell a product and it sell the product the way the people want you will make a ton of money. Thats how capitalism is suppose to work.
Let's be realistic Pudge, Apple would not have been able to get anything off the ground for the Music Store if it had no sharing limits. As with almost everything these days, a compromise is reached that makes the best sense for both parties (or for one, depending on your viewpoint).
I know, I know...this is slashdot, where every editor shows their bias on each story. Perhaps I'm asking too much.
-Cyc
/.'s 10 Millionth
"It's not possible to protect digital content."
That really isn't that insightful. What he should have said was "people are still going to copy digital content, no matter what you do." Saying that it's not possible to protect digital content is just like saying "it's not possible to protect your home." You can put a lock on the door, but a burglar can break the window. You can put up an alarm, he can cut the power or something. You can create an armored bunker, but if the burglar's got a tank, it's not really going to matter.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
I personally like the idea of being able to hear a song before I buy it and then just buy the songs I like. That why iTunes is good.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
I'd heard of iTunes but I never bothered to look at it before, assuming it was just another music download service.
I love the idea and the way it's implemented... unlimited burning to CD is what I want and that's what you get. It seems America-centric which puts me off a little (I'm not going to be phoning America when my credit card gets charged by accident) but I was very interested in it and my girlfriend agreed with me.
I looked into it with the possibility of getting her a gift certificate for it for Christmas. Well... I would if it would work on ME or 98. Oh well, another good idea down the drain. I ain't paying to upgrade to XP (as well as the associated hassle) just for that one program, when everything else I download runs just fine. Come on Apple, get off your backside and make a 98 version.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
While I don't necessarily believe that they can protect it, I think it's far more interesting that here's yet another group that thinks just because a Ph.D. said something it's gotta be true. Holy crap, when are they going to learn that a Ph.D. doesn't give people complete insight into all things. Hell, most of the time they don't have insight beyond the scope of their own disseration.
Seeing as AAC has already been broken using their own player, I think that point is pretty well proven. It's not possible to protect digital content, if by "protect" you mean preventing copying.
Did you RTFA? Jobs explains how when he first pitched the idea the record companies balked because they wanted to do just that: use a subscription based model. These all failed and the record companies realized that pay per track was a more profitable idea.
I think it shows that there isn't a large enough market for subscription base. Those people are the hardcore music listeners, they are the minority. Most people listen to a song on the radio and say "wooooo that is catchy" and pay and download it and be done.
I haven't seen one "copy protection" scheme that has actually worked yet and I don't expect to see any in the future either. It's trivial to take the songs off an iPod and people are starting to unravel the DRM on the iTunes music store files - give it time ...
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
I've pretty much given up on iTunes and Napster 2 and the others for the time being. Only rarely do they have a specific song I am looking for. I also don't think they will ever, of course, carry the rare concert recordings that were easy to get on Napster 1.0 in its heyday (the stuff the RIAA can't whine about: they refuse to take our money for it in any way, anywhere).
If the RIAA wants the legal downloads to flourish, they should get serious about selling the music.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
No matter how much something is regulated (ie copyright), the laws of supply and demand still operate, albeit partially shaken up during the initial regulatory process.
When music is hard to get (low supply) and people want it (demand goes up) the price goes up. Look at live music back in the time of Bach or Beethoven. The average person could not afford it -- so only the rich had the best music. The poor had their "opera houses" that were not very safe and did not sound very good.
When music started to get more accessible (records and then tapes) and cheaper, supply went up, and demand went down, so the price went down.
As music became popularized through more radio productions and later television productions (MTV, etc), the supply went way up, the demand went way up, so the prices stayed consistent. The record labels charged what people were willing to pay. If the people were not willing to pay $18 for a CD, the prices would have come DOWN (supply up, demand down, prices drop).
Now we have the Internet. Supply goes up immensely, and demand to pay $18 a CD goes away. Therefore demand has dropped at that price, so the price has basically dropped. Some people pay $18, some people want it for free. Of course the record labels earn "less" per person per song. But the distribution cycle is so different, therefore you have to really look at the supply and demand issues differently.
If the incentive to produce "good" music goes down (less profit), then "good" music will diminish. As there is less and less "good" music, the supply will go down. Demand for "good" music will go up. People who are taking music for free will have less and less music to take for free. The free market over rides copyright and other bad laws by removing the supply of good music, as the incentive to profit is lost.
This is what will happen over time. Music production houses will find that they can make more money selling their popular tunes to TV commercials, movies soundtracks, nightclubs, and other places. Those songs will eventually be thrown into the virtual "public domain" of the Internet, but the cost to produce the music will be a function of the price of a movie, the cost to enter a nightclub, or the cost of a shampoo or fragrance or whatever it is that uses the song for its background music in a commercial.
You can regulate, you can mandate, you can tax. But you can't run from the rules of supply and demand.
yeah, he asks his programmers :P
*runs*
need I say more?
litigious bastards
suck it sco!
This is a little apples to oranges (hah hah) and you are strictly comparing song revenue, but repeat after me "Apple is a hardware company. Apple is a hardware company."
iTunes exists to sell iPods. What's the profit margin like when you factor those in?
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
This, of course, makes Linux illegal. Unless all access to hard drives and similar hardware is enclosed in a closed-source, black-box interface layer. The effective end of open source.
I'm hoping the electronics industry will never go for it, but considering the recent news about Phoenix ditching BIOS in favor of "Trusted Computing," that hope is rapidly fading.
We need to do something before the right to hack stuff is completely taken away.
dinner: it's what's for beer
Yah subscrption services are fine, until you cancel your subscription or the company goes belly up. Then all the music you collected is unaccessable due to retarded DRM. At least with iTunes I can burn a copy of the music I buy, becuase I bought it, instead of renting it though some subscription service.
This service is right in line with my interests and desires. I am happy to download a few tunes a month for 3 bucks or so, which is exactly what I do. I like browsing, and the "featured artist" music videos are great (Just watched Missey Elliott's "Work it").
I think that this model is perfect for the vast majority of people.
There's one hitch that's not often talked about, though. It is that the "share music locally" doesn't work with purchased music. So, the CDs I've bought can be shared on my LAN, but my legally "purchased" music can't (unless I authorize those computers to play my stuff).
I don't think that this makes any sense from any angle, except a bit of buckling to RIAA et. al. If I can share what I bought on physical media, why can't I share what I bought digitally. Of course, one of the things I most want to share is new tunes I've grabbed, and I don't want to go around authorizing/deauthorizing my colleauges' machines. Hopefully, they'll find a way to enable sharing of ITMS purchases in the future.
(re: Microsoft's designs on entering the music world)
"And Apple is in a pretty interesting position. Because, as you may know, almost every song and CD is made on a Mac -- it's recorded on a Mac, it's mixed on a Mac, the artwork's done on a Mac. Almost every artist I've met has an iPod, and most of the music execs now have iPods."
And this affects what system the music gets played on in what way? Most american homes are made from Canadian lumber, but that doesn't make me more likely to want to become a Canadian. I suppose it's nice self-back-scratching.
And, of course, most of those top music execs probably got their iPods for free during the negotiations. Heck, if I knew somebody who didn't have a PC or email in 2001, I sure as heck wouldn't try to get them to use a 2 year old Archos jukebox!
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
How about movies? Do you see an iTunes movie store?
"We don't think that's what people want. A movie takes forever to download -- there's no instant gratification."
Right now, on a good cable connection, it takes about 30-45 minutes to download a good quality mpeg4 version movie (at 700Kbs). Cable can easily increase its bandwidth over time (not so easy with DSL), so that time interval will be decreasing. As more and more people have access to faster and faster connectivity, Jobs statement will become meaningless (as it already has for the fastest cable users). The quality of the movies will increase as well, to fill the available bandwidth.
The movie studios should NOT make the same mistakes that the music industry did. They should start offering legitimate good quality legal downloads NOW, before too many people start thinking about movies the way they do mp3s.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
"Our position from the beginning has been that eighty percent of the people stealing music online don't really want to be thieves. But that is such a compelling way to get music. It's instant gratification. You don't have to go to the record store; the music's already digitized, so you don't have to rip the CD. It's so compelling that people are willing to become thieves to do it. But to tell them that they should stop being thieves -- without a legal alternative that offers those same benefits -- rings hollow. We said, "We don't see how you convince people to stop being thieves unless you can offer them a carrot -- not just a stick." And the carrot is: We're gonna offer you a better experience . . . and it's only gonna cost you a dollar a song. "
This man Understands.
On the "Rip, Mix, Burn" campaign, Jobs said:,
The person who assailed us over it was Michael Eisner. But he didn't have any teenage kids living at home, and he didn't have any teenage kids working at Disney whom he talked to, so he thought "rip" meant "rip off." And when somebody actually clued him in to what it meant, he did apologize.
You know, that says so much about Disney and their current state of affairs.
Who said Freedom was Fair?
Many probably recall the guy who put his I-tunes track on E-bay and will remember that it was cancelled because of an E-Bay policy, not an I-tunes policy.
This is a very important issue here because it blurs the line between Right of First Sale and Fair Use. While it's unlikely that right of First Sale can be sidestepped, how is it going to be possible to convince people who eventually will want to swap their legally purchased products from getting a bit of their money back in a legitimate re-sale. This is a great re-sale market from the buyers perspective because you can be sure the quality is top notch even after many sales. You just have to trust that people won't keep a copy in an open format when they make the sale. I'd say the whole premise is weak.
And yes, I do know that there are people of the opinion that Right of First Sale cannot apply in digital distribution, but if you look at the arguments that have been presented, the weak link is usually the part where they try to define copy and mangle the technical facts of how digital media is played in various digitial devices. There is no blanket defintion of copy that can cover all cases unless you use a naive definition of terms like RAM. That may convince non-technical people, but under closer scrutiny I've never seen a solid definition that worked across serval commonly available digital music players.
Right... and I subscribe NetFlix and when I return the DVD I no longer have it. That doesn't mean that Netflix is worthless.
For a bunch of technologists, the Slashdot crowd is suprisingly reactionary when it comes to music. Ever consider that the currently model of buying music permanently isn't the be all and end all? For me, paying $10 per month for access to basically all the music I care about is a fantastic, unbelievable deal. I can still buy CDs or even buy tracks on iTunes if I want - but that doesn't negate the value of the subscription service.
Which press? Links?
Earnings report link?
How many of those "subscribers" just signed up for a free trial period? (Elsewhere they make a point of mentioning "paying subscribers", so i think that's a valid question.)
How many subscribers cancelled or went inactive during the quarter?
There's lots of stuff that gets glossed-over or left out of official press releases. I don't use either service, nor do i own an Apple product, so i have nothing to gain from either one, but i distrust anything a company says about itself.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
David Bowie predicted that, because of the Internet and piracy, copyright is going to be dead in ten years. Do you agree?
No. If copyright dies, if patents die, if the protection of intellectual property is eroded, then people will stop investing. That hurts everyone. People need to have the incentive so that if they invest and succeed, they can make a fair profit. Bullshit. Look at the Open Source movement.
The problem is there isn't enough new stuff every month to justify the subscription model. There has to be an incentive for keeping the subscription, else why wouldn't I just burn everything I wanted and cancel, wait six months, subscribe for one month and burn everything, ad infinitum.
I mean, the way the music industry has always solved the lack of content problem is to release a few tracks from each album slowly, over a few weeks, then release some more album tracks from groups in the same genre.
That seems to be the antithesis of the instant gratification model that iTunes offers, which is essentially what the info age is all about. The entertainment industry in general seems to have a ton of people who are very good at doing what has been done, but very few (none at all?) visionaries.
It's nothing but crumpled porno and Ayn Rand.
Here we are ... discussing an article that's published in a magazine, and also available online for free ... yet thousands of people still subscribe to "Rolling Stone". Maybe if the music industry could figure out how both worlds could possibly exist ... a free version and a paid version of the exact same content ... they'd be able to survive in the future.
I tried subscrition based music purchases. And they don't really work that well. Emusic tried to make a go at it, but never managed to get much content that I actually wanted to buy. I found myself downloading crap I only half liked bacause I didn't want my subscription fee for that particular month to go to waste.
The thing I've noticed about iTMS is that I have purchased a lot of music that I actually like. Because I have to pay per song I'm pickier about what I download and I don't feel any preasure to download X number of songs in a month just to feel like I got my monies worth.
Subscription is great if the source has a lot of stuff you like and you don't have much of an established collection.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
buy from those who DO
The problem here is that those who do NOT have a lock on the media of promotion to those people inside moving vehicles and those people inside retail establishments. When was the last time you heard a commercial FM radio station play more than 5 percent of non-major-label music? Not every city has enough free space in its FM band to let the local community college start an FM radio station. (I live in one of the unlucky cities.)
or DO IT YOURSELF
Are you sure this is feasible? Though it's rather easy now for any songwriter to produce a rough recording of his song using Modplug Tracker, most people cannot afford formal training in songwriting.
And before that it was badly encoded songs at crappy bitrates, every comedy song on the planet labeled as being sung by Weird Al, misslabeled songs, porn soundtracks, etc...
The simple fact is that the P2P networks are so full of garbage as to make hem not worth the effort. And it's always been like that. Anyone who's tried them out can tell you that.
With a legal source you dion't really have to worry about the sabotage files, the misnamed files and the crappy encodings. And you can preview anything before you decide to buy it. Every track on iTunes can be previewed.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Movies are different. You probably listen to a particular 5 minute song at least 10 times a year compared to a 2 hour movie, which you may watch once or twice. People typically watch movies for the story and F/X, which tend to stick in your memory a long time (so much that it's usually worth more to rent from netflix than pay more to buy the movie). But the song is usually played over and over because of the catchy tune, which is usually too complex/detailed to remember. Renting a particular song over and over will typically cost you more than if you bought it.
One problem with this, a human eye only "refresh" its neurons roughly 20 times a second, therefore occasional flashes of dots wouldn't register. However, a human ear can refresh itself up to 20,000 a second (the reason why most people's upper hearing frequency is 20,000 hertz), any slight variation in the sound track will be detected by someone who had listen to music enought times.
In US, you can easily buy enough major firearms to wipe out your neighbourhood but a few little fireworks are banned.
"If copyright dies, if patents die, if the protection of intellectual property is eroded, then people will stop investing. That hurts everyone. People need to have the incentive so that if they invest and succeed, they can make a fair profit. But on another level entirely, it's just wrong to steal. Or let's put it this way: It is corrosive to one's character to steal."
Fair enough. But then, so is making oodles of profit, Mr. Billionaire.
Why not just charge cost? I'd probably buy music again (no, I don't steal it now) if it was just covering costs and not going to make rich people richer. Take it a step further, and work with music companies that only charge cost themselves.
Think Different: Convert Apple to a nonprofit corporation. Start a more substantial moral revolution.
An "all you can eat buffet" works as a business concept, because everybody eats dinner once per evening, and they almost everybody eats 1 - 3 plate loads of food.
Most music consumers are broken into two groups: Those who only buy about one album a month or less, for whom the subscription model is not worth the money, and those who would be downloading music several hours each week, off whom you would not be making a profit.
So, the customers who you do get, you get at a loss, and nobody else will sign up for your service. Not really a situation that lends itself to profit, is it?
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
The flashes of dots certainly do register, they were quite noticable at a couple of points during Matrix Revolutions for instance. I wouldn't say they spoilt the film but they were certainly visible.
Of course dots for a second in a 1 and a half hour film aren't too much of an annoyance, but a blip in a 3min music track would be very annoying.
You clearly don't understand the way Rhapsody works. With Rhapsody I'm not "renting a particular song over and over." The comparison is not "10 cents per listen of a song vs. 99 cents to own forever." Rhapsody's model is that for $10 per month I'm renting basically all the recorded music in the world (OK not all - but most that I care about) for a month. Since there's no additional cost to listening to a new song, I listen to lots and lots of new music that I otherwise would not have listened to, and lots of stuff I probably don't care enough about to spend 99 cents on, but that I enjoy listening to anyway.
We all have a mental list of talented and creative people we wish success to -- singers or bands we think should be recognized, actors we'd like to see in a series or a leading role, authors whose books we eagerly recommend to others and sometimes buy extra copies just to give away. I've given people money to support hopeless film projects because I think they're talented, and bought books no one else will ever read because I want the writer to keep writing.
We used to have formal systems for patronage, which provided financial support and promotion to individuals with talent or potential. What modern systems have taken the place of patronage? Are they better or worse at promoting the people "we wish success to"?
How can technology be used to promote people 'worthy' of patronage? We have various forms of word of mouth (e.g. blogrolling, recommended reading lists, etc.) but that doesn't seem like much help when you see cream that isn't rising to the top.
There should be a word for this.
McMe
"Require that anything that can process a digital media signal (hardware or software) be enclosed in a black box in which the only access to the signal is with a valid decryption key, and the only output is analog. Then you make "reverse engineering" of any such device illegal.
This, of course, makes Linux illegal. Unless all access to hard drives and similar hardware is enclosed in a closed-source, black-box interface layer. The effective end of open source."
I wouldn't worry about that juuust yet. I'm sure the RIAA would love to sacrifice general purpose computing at the alter of the almighty dollar, but any such measures wouldn't work, and wouldn't last for long.
First, it would take trillions of dollars to convert everyone to the new hardware, and it would take a long bloody time and everyone with a CD collection would be screaming bloody murder.
Second, it would put the US and American companies at a huge disadvantage. Innovation in the computer industry, proprietary or not, depends on kids fucking with computers in the basement. I'm sure big companies would support such restrictions, because it would be easier for them to get general purpose computer licenses, and they'd be able to dominate in the domestic market without worrying about upstarts, but they wouldn't be able to compete with the rest of the world because the general level of competence would be so low.
Third, it's just too fucking easy to smuggle stuff in, break protection, or build it oneself. 50 cent microcontrollers with like 5k gates are never going to get DRM, period. Hell, you'd have to put DRM in transistors because that's the only way you're going to make conversion between analog and digital too hard for anyone to bother. That would put the US and American companies at basically an impossible disadvantage, because the components would cost a fortune and they'd cost more to work with because there'd be more stuff to break.
When someone might yell at me, it has to be OpenBSD.
Now I know how upstanding people will get all fired up how doing something out of mere convenience is immoral. To which I will answer that this is precisely why you are not Steve Jobs. The man see the market for something, and is interested legitimizing the activity. Like it or not, downloading music was, in 1999, morally ambiguous. Steve Jobs acknowledges this, and seeks to make it legally possible in 2003 for this convenience, becuase quite clearly, this is the way forward for a music distribution system.
Does reasoning morally impede the ability to reason with foresight. This is holding you back from improving, or supporting the improvement of the state of the world to one where both the consumer and the producer of the content can be satisfied?
[Record Companies] hate downloading music because they didn't come up with it first.
Oh please! Gimmie a break! You're so off the mark, it's not even funny. Record companies don't give a sh*t about such juvenile phallus-metrics like "who invented it first" - they're all about the bottom line. That's all Vivendi, Universal, et. al. care about. They couldn't care less who invented it. They only care whether or not it will increase their profits.
These mega-corporations didn't get as huge as they are by succumbing to such pitiful "Not-Invented-Here" ego-wars. They chase the money. That's all.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
And the carrot is: We're gonna offer you a better experience . . . and it's only gonna cost you a dollar a song.
So: Tom Waits "Rain Dogs" = $19; Bob Dylan "Infidels" = $9; Philip Glass "Music in 12 Parts" (3 CDs) = $12? Where are they going with that bologna? Are the Boredoms or other experimental artists going to sell any of their extra-long tracks or one-track albums for just $1? Are artists going to be forced to ditch the 'album' experience and focus on hovering a saleable image over a bunch of disconnected songs?
Does commercialism or commercial break cause ADHD?
Another funny thing: a lot of the insistance that we pay to share data that appears to be somebody's music is based on the idea of 'intellectual property' and this unproven (untested) theory that 'intellectual property' and 'copyright' are required for the global economy to function.
Meanwhile, they still want to charge top dollar for recordings of compositions that are in the public domain. And, corporations pressure lawmakers to change the meaning of 'copyright' anyways for instance extending the lifetime of copyrights an additional few decades just because an expensive icon is about to become free.
Why the double standards? Could they be reasoning all of this over profits, not their purported ideals? It's possible. I wonder why we allow ourselves to continue to be duped by laws controlling information after seeing time and again that it does information no good.
I just think it's strange that such antisocial tendencies as 'competition' and 'private property' are being pushed on the back of such raging idealism when the idealists aren't even serious about ideology except as packaging and when said ideals are contradictory. The package is being bought despite these logical inconsistencies.
The carrot is their false ideologies and the stick is the truth that the world is ruled by violence and issues of MP3 piracy only matter to a civilization of very comfortable hogs.
Anyways its a fitting analogy; only in agricultural civilization could food become so scarce that a stuck carrot would be so tantalizing to so many.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Because their is so much more to music than making it. By your definition Wilco is a group of looser musicians who are dragging the ship down and Britney Spears is what everyone should aspire to be. Not all of us think this way.
Jack Valenti and Orrin Hatch will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
RIAA doesn't want to provide "value". They want to get paid for doing something which is essentially worthless--the act of copying the song to the media and distributing it to us. Hello, RIAA--we've got that one under control. You're fired; your job has been replaced by a computer.
As long as RIAA insists on getting something for nothing, there will be no foldouts, posters, 12" full-color art prints, etc.
I agree that RIAA needs to go back to their old business model. (maybe without the abusive artist contracts). Find something they can produce in quantity for a $3-5 a pop. Something that costs an individual user $20 to produce as a one-off. And charge $10.00 for it.
But in order to do that, they're going to have to let go of the idea that they can just sit back and let the money roll in.
Those days are over. Denial is the issue here. RIAA is going to start having to work for their bread. It's going to take a few bloody noses in the financial department for them to realize that.
Funny thing is--this is exactly the issue that RIAA raises when pointing fingers. "You're stealing. You want something for nothing." Point your finger, RIAA. Now, look at your hand. There's 3 fingers pointing right back at you.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
While the fixed (up-front) cost of the gaggle of bits is high, the marginal cost is zero (or pennies if they require an extra DVD). In comparison, the marginal cost of an extra glossy, four-colour insert is substantial. An that's why you get the gaggle of bits and cheap packaging, because the packaging costs extra money that shrinks their profits.
But because it's easy and cheap for them to copy, it's also cheap and easy for everyone else to copy.
You have learn to read better than that. Job's certainly did not say it took a PhD to figure that out. He is in effect saying that very smart people know that digital works cannot be totally protected from copying. It's not hilarious: his audience is more than the digerati, who understand this. His audience is also the people who produce the music, and he is in effect telling them not to chase the copy protection chimera.
Was I the only person who was a little uncomfortable with his evaluation of the music industry? To hear him tell it, the music industry has people whose job is to find 'successes'. Notice he didn't say find talented artists, or artists who people would like to listen to, but instead 'successes'.
Sure, the music industry makes no bones about the fact they are in it for the money, and nobody can blame them for that. But what gets me is how the industry is focused more on 'successes' (read: mega stars) then consistently signing good artists that would make them a consistent profit. Sign a dozen boy bands, or a dozen blonde bombshells, or a dozen hard core gangsta' rappers, or a dozen neo-metal bands . . . that all sound the same, spend millions on each of them, and then hope one of them sticks and puts up numbers like New Kids on the Block, J-lo, Ice-T or Korn.
It just seems that the recording industry is incapable of objectively evaluating quality in music, and instead is only able to evaluate potential 'success' insofar as an artist meets certain criteria in terms of marketability which has little to do with the actual music: Does the artist have the right look? Will the artist be able to give the impression of a certain 'lifestyle' key demographics are looking for? It's reached the point where the only difference between a country music star and a 'alternative' radio star is how long the artists hair is, and how much twang is added to the guitar track.
Music is--or at least should be--art. It's not wrong to make money from that art, but when your business model only works when art stops being a consideration and marketability becomes the only consideration, things start to fail. I almost get the impression that Jobs has a faint understanding of that; Stop throwing million dollar advances at countless sound-a-like bands and take the time to invest in unique individual artists, and perhaps the industry isn't doomed.
The Internet is generally stupid
From the article:
Still, Jobs' bet on digital music is a hugely risky move in many ways, not only because powerhouses such as Dell and Wal-Mart are gunning for Apple (and Microsoft will be soon, as well), but because success may depend on how well Jobs, a forty-eight-year-old billionaire, is able to understand and respond to the fickle music-listening habits of eighteen-year-olds in their college dorms.
I don't think Apple has to worry about fickle music listeners, because there is no such thing. Tastss change to be sure but it's not like Apple is an sll-Ska store, for example.
What Apple has to do is very simple - not piss off the customers. That's it. If a store is appealing and simply does nothing bad to a customer, many many people will keep using that store as long as they do nothing to drive them away. People are more disposed to change through dissatisfaction than being drawn elsewhere.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The iPod isn't made for someone with a fifty rack cd colection. It's made for the music collector. While I can't consider myself a full out music collector, I am a heavy consumer of music. I'll have spent a handy $7500.00 on my music collection during my life, easily. That's 7500 iTunes purchases. We can see that the numbers begin to add up.
I have 300 cd's. Not an uncommon number for a music afficianado. A co-worker of mine owns twice as much and his Music library will amount to 40-50 gigs.
iPods are not for the casual pop consumer who owns 50 cd's. Compare this to the collector who has 50 Rolling Stones cd's, and the entire pink floyd discography.
Hell I probably have more NIN material than most people have of any music.
__
Thou hast besquirted me, O leotarded one.
Steve's no dummy. When people do interviews like this, they have a specific message they are trying to get across. He didn't want to answer this specific question, so he gave the message he wanted to provide. I don't think any answer to this question would be a good one.
There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes. -- Dr. Who
Schemes such as Logic Audio's XS Key, which is a usb device that does some super-stealthy encryption and dating of what are essentially security cookies, are near impossible to crack. It doesn't seem to out of the realm of possibility to see similar schemes employed for mp3's and their analogues. Isn't this what MS is trying to do w/ their new systems? Of course with mp3's, any setup that's too complicated will be rejected by music listeners outright . . . But I think a different question is, why should the record industry exist at all? Of course the mass production of CD's is one element, giving recording artists access to studios is another . . . but don't most artists make next to nothing on records, instead relying on touring !?!?!? If the record industry falls, it will become segmented into different industries which are arranged in such a way that artists are able to "freelance" around studios and production, and have more control over the sales of their music. And it will be the industry's own fault, reflecting the illogics of its own structure.
"Mathematics is the language of nature"
It's not that they don't register... it's that watching and listening are two seriously different processes, and the consumers of visual and audio content have different thresholds of acceptable interference.
You see, people are accustomed to having their visual feed interrupted for short times. We blink, we turn our heads, a man crosses in front- whatever the cause, small visual breaks don't bother us. Hollywood (mostly in years past) would happily release a movie with a dropped frame or a hair on the corner of the screen, knowing that it won't bother the audience enough to hurt sales.
But perceptual reaction to modified sounds are different. Humans never stop hearing. They don't go deaf for 2 seconds to refresh the ears; a hand in front of your head doesn't block sound. Sound is something that normally will never be disturbed- and if it is, we're bothered. So the consumer's threshold for audio modification is much lower than for visual.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
CDS ARE CHEAP.
Hold on a second. When CDs came out they were twice as expensive as LPs. Labels said this was due to their limited manufacturing ability at the time (it was limited). Flash forward to when CD manufacturing costs plummetted. Where was the corresponding plummet in price? There was none, the labels enjoyed the fat profit of their inflated price. The labels made their bed with their own greed and now they get to lay in it.
What other form of entertainment even comes close to offering this much bang-for-the-buck?
Right now I can walk down the street and purchase "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly", a three-hour movie, remastered and fully restored, for ten bucks. I can then walk over to the music aisle and get an old, not remastered CD of the soundtrack (about 30 minutes of music) for eleven bucks.
In conclusion:
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
You're absolutely correct that movies have become a social event: For many people, movies are where you go to sit and talk with your friends, often via cellphone. If theater operators have turned up the sound, it's so the handful of people who actually want to watch the movie can perhaps still do so.
If you don't like the movie-going experience, blame the moviegoers.
-Graham
How is overprecision a fallacy? That's just ridiculous. Law is entirely based on precision of language. There is no such thing as overprecsion where the law is concerned.
I don't download music, so I don't need any excuses. Copyright infringment is not theft, that's why it's called "copyright infringement" and not "theft". I'm not sure how much clearer it can be made. The other posters arguments were very plain. It seems you are the one who is in denial here, because you can't, for whatever reason, accept that these crimes are not the same thing. Your empty arguments just add to the FUD.
If you don't mind slumming it, most of the 2nd run theaters show month old movies for about $3 with maybe 3 or 4 trailers and no commercials. You won't impress a date by taking her there, but then again, how many movies this year were good enough to be worth the $9 full price ticket.
...that if an elderly educated person said that something in his realm of expertise could be done, he was almost always correct. If an elderly educated person said that something in his area of expertise could not be done, he would most likely be wrong.
Wrong again, RIAA!! HA!
1) the "right" to rent a work, etc. under your terms is not a physical or inherent right as is property (which is explicitly given such status in the US Constitution) - it is a licence, more analogous to software under EULA than land or physical property. Thus your legal position is incorrect. (see other posts on this thread).
2) the fact that you don't like something or feel that it should be more disliked that it currently is does not justify intentional obfuscation. Copyright infringement is not theft, both in the eyes of the law (previous SC decisions and the Constitution) and morally. It is wrong and prosecutable, but nonequivalent. (considering the ransom the RIAA is attempting to extract for copyright infringement versus the potential civil and criminal penalties for the theft of physical CDs, the RIAA doesn't view theft and copyright infringement them as identical, either.)
I could call copyright infringement "mass murder" but that commits two sins at once. One, a word with a precise legal meaning is intentionally confused with another - thus if repeated, neither word means what it did before. Speakers can't be sure what either term means, and so both terms lose the ability to express ideas that is their purpose. Two, the moral implications of mass murder are diluted by conflating it with copyright infringement; legitimate uses of the term lose their moral force in speech where they should possess such force.
Eggs are not chickens, no matter what I call them. Theft and copyright infringement are legal terms with independent legal realities, like a chicken and an egg. Choosing to call one the other doesn't prove that they are the same, only that the speaker either doesn't know or doesn't care about the law. The fact that copyright infringement is wrong and that the potential consequences are bad and likely harmful does not change its legal status.
3) copyright entitles both the users (via rights codified in law or requiring specific denial in law) and the providers. If I purchase a DRM CD, the rights given to me by copyright law are infringed - the terms of the copyrights are violated. In both cases, the users and the artist are deprived of the license to use a work as they see fit, rights in both cases given by law. Respect for copyrights requires that the people whose use them for profit should start by respecting them themselves. Linguisitic legerdemain or name-calling will not change reality - when the industries dispect their customers and the law that protects them while emphasizing and demonizing violations of the law by others and aggrandizing its defense of their actions, people will return the dispect in kind.
Copyright infringement is neither good in and of itself nor a good way of achieving the respect of copyright owners for the rights of their users, but according a moral status (theft) to it which the people who use copyrights are unwilling to accord it themselves (by altering copyright limitations with DRM and other schemes to limit legally given rights to use) is intellectually dishonest and ultimately counterproductive to the rights you hope to preserve.
Does the music industry serve to find the 'successes' among the rubbish out there?
The argument holds up, if we ignore one gigantic, gargantuan, glaring fact: the music industry has a monopoly.
So, is it that they find, like so many diamonds in the rough, the better acts, or would the more accurate portrayal be that they, being the only means of distribution, exploit the best talent? The monopoly makes the answer impossible to determine, since there is no free market going on in music.
The same is true of the moral argument around file sharing. People who protect the current system seem to forget that they're protecting an arguably illegal cartel that inarguably price-gouges them. That the music industry has a monopoly and abuses it, again, clouds the whole issue.
Underneath the clouds, I think the real problem the music industry faces is life without a monopoly. Their abuse of the consumer has caused an alternative means of distribution to crop up that seems impervious to the laws that the industry has, in the past, been able to bend to its will. They had a unique thing - a guarantee of revenue. What a business! But now it's evaporating, and they'll have to actually compete for their food, like the rest of us.
Jobs probably doesn't have it wrong; he's just politicing. He has to, now that he's in bed with the music guys.