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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
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!
--
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
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 think what he was referring to was the analog gap. If my ears can hear it, and/or if my eyes can see it, i can copy it and stick it on the net. Your analogy to a house actually sums up the point. If there is an inside to the house, there is always a way to get in there.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
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.
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.
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.
A Ph D says to me, "I have been certified to research, analyze, and come up with hypotheses." Sure, the hypothesis can still be wrong. Reasoning can still be biased and flawed. The research could be incomplete or rely on discredited work.
But it's less likely to be flawed than that of some marketer making guesses somewhere. It's far less likely to be incomplete than some random slashdot post. I trust a Ph D to at least THINK before making a judgment...I am not such an anti-intellectual anarchist snob that I can automatically assume that school is a tool of the system and all doctoral students are mindless sheep. But hey, maybe I just don't read enough Cat and Girl comics.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
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.
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.
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.
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
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
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
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.