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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."'"
"And it only takes one stolen copy to be on the Internet. The way we expressed it to them was: You only have to pick one lock to open every door." I really like this idea, and I think it needs highlighting. The simple truth is that music companies, so stuck to their physical medium, seem to have been, for so long, under the impression that mp3's are much like pieces of physical media; they're copied once, that copy goes somewhere, and then its all over, as if this "copying" thing requires some kind of physical action that each user must complete, much like Xeroxing paper.
What I found, while wanting to sample a song (before I buy the CD), was when you download a song and play it, they have the first ten seconds of the song play normally, then a high pitched sound screeches designed to destroy speakers. I doubt a 10 year old kid is behind that.
But the good news is that WinMX is not as spammed as Kazaa. Not as many people, but chances are you will not get the mp3's which are clearly designed to destroy speakers.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
...at least he certainly gives that impression. His description of the "Kazaa experience" is the most intelligent thing I've heard a big executive say about Kazaa lately. It almost sounds as if he's tried it himself--or, at the very least, isn't six layers removed from someone who has.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Why do the record companies hate this so much?
Because the underlings have undermined their authority.
Think all the way back, changes in the recording industry, all the way to Thomas Edison, have resulted because a few people with a lot of money made changes. Magnetic Reel to Vinyl, Vinyl to Cassette, Cassette to CD (With the bastard child DAT in there somewhere), these changes all came about as a result of music industry exectives decreeing it.
They hate downloading music because they didn't come up with it first. It's superior to their physical distribution mechanisms, but because they didn't think of it; first they tried to crush it, then they tried to crush it again, with insane DRM.
It takes (I can't believe I'm going to say this, but) normal people like Jobs to put them in their place.
I think it says alot about the music industry when Steve Jobs becomes the straight man.
In order to guarantee revenue from a subscription based method, the service has to insure you'll stay. The only real way to do this is by making your downloaded music tied to your subscription. If your subscription goes away, so does your music. After all, what is to prevent someone with a big pipe from paying for one month and downloading the entire library and leaving? Because of this, these services are MORE restrictive than iTunes.
iTunes' pricing scheme is $1 for a track or $10 for an album. That is cheap. That's what CDs should be priced at. I praise the prices of iTunes because it offers a reasonable price.
Customers don't always have to be ripped off. But the companies don't have to be ripped off either. Your idea doesn't work and there have been many failed services to prove it. What needs to happen is a happy compromise between the record companies and the consumer. The consumers need to get music for a reasonable price, but the record labels and artists need to get a fair profit. I believe iTunes is as close to this happy medium as we'll get.
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.
Ah, but we are taught to work a problem until we have the answer. And I should remind you that the dissertation is only the beginning. Most of us finish the dissertation and then begin work on completely different projects that will set the course for the rest of our careers and the smartest of us will not only be able to discuss problems in great depth within our field, but we will also be able to draw upon broad training in a number of other fields. For instance, my training is in neuroscience, medicine and physiology, but there is also significant background in computer science and image analysis that has allowed our lab to make significant headway in the field of molecular phenotyping using a combination of fields of study including neuroscience, physiology, molecular biology, genetics, computer science and chemistry along with image forensics and analysis.
There are a great many labs around with incredibly smart individuals in them that would scare the pants off of many of us with their intelligence, so don't sell someone short simply because you don't know what they know.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
...the interesting question that Jobs sidesteps here is, "In a world where music is increasingly downloaded, why do we need the traditional record companies at all?"
Why not just have Apple (or any online service) provide recording studio time and some advertising?
Jobs doesn't answer this because there is no answer. He hints at it, by saying that pretty soon the record companies won't be able to offer advances and survive (in which case, they are useless to the artist), but in general the best he can come up with for the record company's purpose is that "they pick winners." Hogwash.
1. He goes on to say that they lose money because they also pick losers, and
2. we all know as their audience that winners are not just picked, they are made. I mean, sure, record companies pick some winners -- because by definition, to be a winner you need a major label. They're serving as gatekeepers on the success of equally talented, but unsigned, artists, due to limits on advertising budgets and the disposable income of the music-buying public. What do they do for their artists? Record companies provide an advance, they provide tons of advertising and payola, and they skim off the top. That's it.
So the key to making iTunes, or any online service, popular with the Napster generation is simply this: guarantee us that the money isn't going to some crap record company, but instead to the artists we appreciate and love (and some to provide expenses and a reasonable profit, maybe 5%, to the new, more effective distribution system). Bottom line. Do that and we'll buy. Until then, screw it.
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
I say, support the artists you like any way you can. If you like a bunch of songs on an album, buy it. See them live when they come to your town. But don't shed a tear when the labels cry about their profit margins shrinking from 20% to 15%. I also don't think they're going away anytime soon, precisely because of their massive margins (but I don't know what they really are because they've hidden their profits so well). However, I do think there is hope from a new generation of internet-based labels, like CD Baby, who are willing to treat artists fairly (gasp! what a concept!). I'm eager to see how this plays out. I hope Jobs will allow smaller labels (like the one I'd like to start in my bedroom) onto iTunes. This will piss of the majors, but...who gives a fuck about them? They've been screwing over artists and consumers for years. Viva la revolution!
Electric Monkey Pants
Observation: Ever looked in the $5.88 DVD bargain bin at Wal-Mart?
Observation: A DVD of a movie typically sells for about the same price as a CD of the movie's soundtrack.
Explanation: DVD Video titles in general are so cheap because the movies fixed therein have already had a theatrical run. CDs don't have anything analogous.
Explanation 2: CDs are rather expensive because the retail price does not have to compete with rentals thanks to the Record Rental Amendment of 1984, which states that no person shall rent, lease, or lend a phonorecord[1] of a copyrighted sound recording without the consent of both the owner of copyright in the sound recording and the owner of copyright in the underlying musical work. In practice, such copyright owners never grant consent for a shop to rent CDs on the scale that a local DVD rental store rents DVDs.
Thanks,
--
Matt
I've read various Steve Jobs interviews and articles over the years and from what I gather, he tries to stay pretty current with computer and communication technology in general, not just the products his current companies churns out. He installed a T1 to his house around 1990 not only to link his personal computers to the NeXT network, but also to allow him to exlore the Internet with the sort of bandwidth the average user would have sometime in the future. A recent article mentioned he upgraded his connection towards the end of the 90s to something even more insane (I don't recall if it was a T3 or OC3) so he could experiment with video conferencing, file transfers, and other "next generation" Internet usage.
As far as Kazaa, I'm almost certain he's used it. Jobs is known to have a few PCs sitting around, some for Windows and some for NeXTSTEP/OpenStep.
It's also been said that Safari (Apple's Konq-based web browser for OS X) was originally a direct demand from Jobs when OmniWeb could no longer render the websites he was visiting.
There was an interview a couple years ago in which he talked about shopping around for some sort of crazy new hightech washing machine (a year or so before the Maytag Neptune came out).
Jobs may be an asshole, and he may not be a hardcore analog electrical engineer, but he seems to be quite the techie... a techie with style. NeXT and the Apple of 2003 display this quite well.
Now if only they would make a brushed aluminum version of the 17" widescreen lcd iMac...
/* The problem here is that those who do NOT have a lock on the media of promotion */
/* 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.) */
/* 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. */
As a fan of the whole "punk rock" genre (and more obscure electronic stuff), I'm very well aware of the so-called "lock" that the big conglomerates have on traditional airwaves. But you know what else? I haven't turned on the radio in several years. Same goes for TV, which also suffers from the same, stifling corporate control. Basically, I've done what countless others have done: Formed networks of people who spread by word of mouth and compilation CD's and tapes and zines and so forth and that's how *we* get distribution and exposure. So what if the college frat kids down the street don't know or care who we are, we're not catering to them. If you're going to "whine" about the lock on the media rather than do something about it (in my case: by helping form and maintain and support alternative methods of distribution and promotion), then you're just like all those other whiners who constantly bitch about shit but never actually do anything about it "because they can't." No one's stopping you but you.
I couldn't tell you the last time I listened to commercial FM radio. Seriously. And it's precisely *because* of their lack of attention to music. But that doesn't stop me from listening to music.
Why are you still bitching about this? There's more to music than RADIO and music videos. Get out and see bands live, get involved in your local music community, start a band. Do Something.
Yes. There's an entire cottage industry of underground music, from electronica (trance, dance, trip hop), hip hop, rock and roll, indie rock, emo, punk, even "adult contemporary" and christian music being done every day by non-major labels.
Why are you making it so complicated? People write good/great music all the time and record on 4-tracks in the basements (see Ween and Pavement). But even then, I know a lot of studios (found in just about every city.. if you're town is starved for free FM radio space, I'm sure you have them, too) with good engineers and producers who are more than willing to work with you to get the "sound" you want. It'll just cost money. And why do you need "formal training" in songwriting? Some of the world's greatest songs and composers didn't have "formal training" in songwriting.
Imagine if Linus had sat around saying "Gee whiz. I can't use anything but Microsoft and Andrew won't let me play with his Minix.. I guess I'll go home and cry and listen to Bjork all day". Microsoft has a very similar grip on the computing industry that you're talking about, and yet there's Linux. And BSD. And countless others (in varying states of completion), countless examples that people aren't letting "microsoft" and their grip on the industry prevent them from doing something they want to do.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
I don't think i've ever scored a -1 rating before, so i thought I would respond to my critics.
Firstly, the EULAs, I will concentrate on Napster 2.
- They may update their EULA at any time, and will not inform you of these changes, the EULA posted on their website (the only place you can see the current version) is not dated nor marked with a revision number. So the entire document must be scanned for changes, unless you complain and uninstall within 30 days of a change, you have indicated your acceptance.
-They reserve the right to push updates to your machine, both for their software, and for any software that communicates with it (namely WMP, but could include Windows itself, and Roxio CD burner). I don't particularily want someone else patching my software thank you very much.
-They reserve the right to disable any related software if the security is tripped, this includes Napster, WMP, and possibly windows itself...
To me, thats all scary stuff individually, when you add it up, I don't think there isnt any rights I havent given them with regards to my machine, and if I havent givent them those rights yet, they can just update the EULA to give them to themselves.
I tried Napster 2 and iTunes hoping to be able to purchase music convienently online. I no longer watch stolen movies, use stolen software, or listen to stolen music. So I needed an easy way to get single songs, or albums I liked, easily. Unfortuantly, not living in the US prevents me from doing this.
And no, it isn't legal for me to copy my neighbour's CDs, even in Canada.
paul reinheimer