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BusinessWeek on Opening Apple's iTunes DRM
hype7 writes "BusinessWeek is running a very interesting story on Apple's foray into music, with a different bent to everyone else's. BW suggests that, instead of opening the iPod up to the world, Apple should instead license its DRM - 'Fairplay' - to anyone who wants to start up a music store. The upside is obvious: it would mean that Apple's music format, AAC, would become ubiquitous; Apple could quite feasibly make money on licensing fees (say 1 cent per song sold); and, it would just happen to stick it to Microsoft and the Windows Media Format. As the iTunes Music Store isn't running at a profit (or forecast to make a big one), having the Music Store clones eat into Apple's existing market share wouldn't be a problem; all these stores would be doing is building a bigger potential market for the iPod."
For the nth time, AAC is not "Apple's DRM technology." It is part of the MPEG-4 specifications. More info here.. To quote:
AAC was developed by the MPEG group that includes Dolby, Fraunhofer (FhG), AT&T, Sony, and Nokia--companies that have also been involved in the development of audio codecs such as MP3 and AC3 (also known as Dolby Digital). The AAC codec in QuickTime 6 builds upon new, state-of-the art signal processing technology from Dolby Laboratories and brings true variable bit rate (VBR) audio encoding to QuickTime.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
...that is a novel (and arguably appealling) tact for Apple to take, it certainly would not be true to their typical behavior (at least not while Steve Jobs is at the helm). Apple likes the 'go it alone' route, regardless of any benefits to other routes.
And of course, one has to wonder if 'ubiquity' would actually happen regardless...
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
I agree with this article. Adding WMA to the iPod is ludicrous (as is Rob Glaser's plea to add other support....Real.....get real!). However, licensing the DRM to AAC that Apple uses would nothing but grow the iPod marketshare because no one could complain that the iTMS is the only place to buy music for the iPod.
However,.......based on Steve's stubborness and protectiveness of Apple, I am not going to hold my breath on this one. Having clones to Apple hardware is one thing and I can understand Steve killing that idea but this is so totally different. Steve readily admits that iTMS is not a breadwinner. But Steve is a just a bit too protective still to license FairPlay.
Here's to hoping.....
No trees were harmed in the composition of this; however, numerous electrons were inconvenienced.
On the other hand, Microsoft's WMA is proprietary no matter how you slice it.
The only reason iTunes has DRM in the first place is because the major labels insist on it: they like their paying customers to have more restrictions than the folks that are getting it for free, makes sense right?
Every fumbling attempt the record companies make to control and restrict music blows up in their face. Case in point, the new, bannedmusic.org which is using a BitTorrent installer packaged with a specific torrent to spread music that's run afoul of the current copyright regime. They could have made money licensing this stuff, but now there ain't nothin they can do about it.
The obvious problem is that what incentive is there for someone to open a music store with encrypted songs that are only playable on the iPod?
Musicians already have ways of submitting their music to the iTMS.
Any large conglomerate opening a music store online is generally stupid or on the "music store" bandwagon, or both. Apple pretty clearly does it because it's a selling point for iPods, and with their early appearance on the scene, they have a good chance to dominate the market until such time as it does become profitable.
So what earthly good does licensing FairPlay do for anyone?
It doesnt say that AAC is Apples DRM.. it says that Apples DRM is called 'Fairplay' and licensing that to others would increase usage of the AAC FORMAT.
Fire in the hands of the village idiot is no tool, but a weapon of mass destruction
I know apple probbaly wont agree, but looking at the sucess of OSS, doesnt it make sense for them to simply open iPod and release its source code, so anyone with lots of time to spare can write interseting and useless plugins.
These will ultimately result in the iPod becoming more popular
An apple a day keeps MS away
That's not Apple's decision to make, since they aren't the owners of AAC. And they're apparently smart enough at least to know that, unlike, say, you.
This is wise-wise-wise advice. However, why stop there? Why not make the entire DRM system a sub-set of QuickTime and get acceptance for other non-audio formats as well? QuickTime is the high-end standard and with the new Pixlet format apple already has a HD leg-up on other folks.
-_-
DRM is essential to the iTunes music store. the RIAA wouldnt agree to it without some DRM. apples DRM is only mildly restricting and it is the iTunes music store that is helping to move their (already sex) iPods. being able to get music for your iPod from multiple sources should encourage more people to buy one (apple makes money) and the dont loose money becase of the compitition since their music store isnt going to make a whole lot.
hell eventualy they could back out of selling music all together if other people will do it for them.
also, you can use an iPod for data storage. as for your sexuality, youll have to talk to an expert, i have no advice on this matter
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
You're a little defensive about your manliness there buddy, I don't have to choose a certain electronics device to reassure myself that people will think I'm straight.
My sig is blank, I typed this by hand.
An online store that wants to sell to iPod users merely has to provide the music in MP3 or unprotected AAC, since the iPod will accept both of those as well as Fairplay-protected AAC. You'd probably have to provide your own client to buy the music, and then use the scripting interface for iTunes to load it onto the iPod.
How would licensing FairPlay to other hardware manufacturers sell more iPods? Oh it wouldn't? Oh then I guess that's not gonna happen.
AAC can be the next audio standard, but FairPlay will not be the DRM standard. An industry DRM standard will have to be devised and then every digital music seller and player must support it. Then iTunes and iPod can continue to simply be the best digital music experience around.
AAC is not "open source" You still have to pay to license it.
My sig is blank, I typed this by hand.
Cheatsheet for this article:
AAC -- must licence from MPEG
WMA -- must licence from Microsoft.
MS DRM -- must licence from Microsoft.
Apple FairPlay -- can't licence from anyone.
So, please, let's quit pissing-n-moaning about "proprietary" -- this is all business.
That's basically why QuickTime gets installed with iTunes, although most users never notice it until after the fact.
I'm almost tempted to believe that iTunes is a trojan horse for QuickTime, allowing Apple to sneak it onto everyone's computer. Very smart idea.
I think that Jobs has his own plan in mind, though I hope he's included "flexibility".
Option 1: Stay Alone
This basically has the iPod and the iTunes Music Store (iTMS) working only together. So far, this situation has proven to be the case, and it's working pretty well: the iPod is the #1 selling MP3 player out there, it's making Apple a butt load of cash (and when you try to carry money in your butt you'll know what I mean), and iTMS is the #1 online music sales system by far - 50 million songs sold compared to Roxio's 5 million. Even comaring apples to , er, apples, just within the 6 months since Napster has been out Apple has made 5 to 1 sales.
If this continues, then eventually Jobs can force out all of the "for profit" music shops out there, and boil it down to just the "for advertising" places, like Wal-Mart, Coke, and Microsoft (which would really be looking to make Windows Media Audio the default standard).
From this, Apple makes AAC the next MP3, and their DRM becomes the "de facto standard" - even though nobody else can use it. Apple makes all the money, and they like it.
This will only come true, however, if Apple keeps a huge lead. What happens when Microsoft (MS) unveals their own online music store (didn't originally they tell folks like Napster that they wouldn't? Well, nevermind that....), sells songs for $0.50 each, takes a hit on profits, and basically acts like they did with Internet Explorer. (Ignoring any antitrust issues - not that Microsoft ever has had to in the past.)
So that goes to Option 2: License the DRM
I have the feeling that Jobs will release this if and only if iTMS and iPod sales start taking a dive. It's his "ace in the hole" to keep iPod sales alive. All it will take is him going to the other stores, making an offer, and then everybody can use the iPod with any service. Sure, it could hurt iTMS removing the one thing that makes it different from everybody else - but Apple is about the hardware.
But what happens if someone like Dell or Gateway come out with their own MP3 player that starts to make the iPod look like yesterday's bulky cell phone? That's when option 3 kicks in:
Option 3: License WMV for the iPod
This one only happens when things are dire and Apple feels they finally have to put in their chips.
The question is, how likely is either option to be? I can see Option 2 and 3 as "someday, maybe" futures. But as of right now, iTMS and the iPod rules the roost, and as long as Apple keeps that up for another 12-24 months, everybody else just in it to "make money selling music" will be so marginalized it won't matter. We're more likely to see Pepsi style promotions than anything else - though Apple had already keep an eye on possible cracks in their popularity: McDonald's may have dumped a iTMS deal in favor of a Sony Online Music one already, though of course nothing is official yet.
2 years I think the dust will be settled. Until then, I'll keep saving up to buy my wife an iPod mini. Hey, if nothing else, they're cute. And she still buys lots of CD's.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
It's a pain in the ass, let's the RIAA and it's member dictate what you can and can't do on a per song basis. Fairplay gives every song the same Rights. Metallica doesn't want their latest album burnable to cd, no probelm MS will stop you cold. Fairplay is Fairplay for theend users. MS doesn't know what fairplay means.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Anyone with some cash and negotiating skills can create an online music store - and many companies have. There's no techological lock-in, exclusivity or leverage that Apple has that they can exploit, and most of the music they offer is also offered by others.
Microsoft, on the other hand, *can*, "*has* and likely *will continue to* leverage their OS monopoly to exclude others for playing in the media space. We'll see what happens when they open their music store.
yeah, but a light pink iPod mini won't be helping your situation any ;)
kiddding! it's not the size that matters, it's the way you groove!
Just so you all know, Winamp, being the awesomely versatile player it is, CAN play AAC songs with Fairplay DRM attached, with this convenient plug-in. Of course, there are many limitations still, but that's proprietary DRM for you.
You can chart and discuss the plug-in's progress here. The older, "officially released" version of the plug-in with brief descriptions and reviews is here.
BTW, Winamp 5.03 is already out, in case you weren't informed.
If you send an email to iTunes Support, and ask them nicely, they will de-authorize all the computers on your account automatically. Just tell them you no longer have the computers you authorized and cannot de-authorize them the normal way.
Worked for me.
Most albums with more than 10 songs on them are $10.
*snerk* Yeah, Apple sure has suffered lately under their boneheaded, non-visionary leadership.
Hell, if they get any worse, their competitors are going to have to start going out of business just to keep from humiliating Apple...
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
I hope Apple doesn't do this, because it will make it much harder for them to drop DRM in the future. Instead of doing as they should by pressuring the RIAA members to allow DRM-free downloads, Apple would implicitly support DRM to protect their new revenue stream. The RIAA needs to realize that DRM doesn't work, and that those who purchase the music generally don't infringe anyway.
I'm going to guess that Apple probably legally can't license the Fairplay technology. I imagine that the RIAA probably has Apple locked into some super restrictive contract that makes it so only Apple can use Fairplay, even though they made it.
After all, (outside of Apple being Apple), why wouldn't they have done it already?
Apple has sold about 30 million songs through the iTunes music store. All told, if they had licensed their FairPlay technology and let someone else open a store and sell those 30 million songs, they would have raked in a cool $300,000 dollars at a penny per song.
Apple is already losing money through the store, and while outsourcing it would have staved off costs, they'd still be very much in the red. Imagine if they now started operating their money-losing store in competition with another money-losing store. Gee, lots of winners there, aren't there?
What it comes down to is they need every penny they can from their own store, and competing with someone else for a crowd they now have a monopoly on won't work -- even if it does sell more iPods, it's going to chip away at their image of being a simple, single source. One application, one portable player, one store, one sign-on, etc. etc.
Perhaps the issue isnt' with control, but with teh fact that Microsoft has shown time and again they will use that control to make your life hell. Apple has not.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
umm.. under a patent is not the same thing as proprietary under copyright.
a patent purchase allows you to see the underlying parts, and even allows you to mess with the stuff (though it this case it really is not an issue)
a copyright purchase only gives you the ability to USE the technology with out seeing the parts.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
All hail FatWallet:
Here are some legal (in Russia!) MP3 download sites - most flat fee:
allofmp3.com
This site is locally legit and songs can be downloaded for as little as $0.01 per MB. That's around 3 cents per song.
DELit
Unusual emphasis on hard rock and metal acts (east European and Russian youth apparently worship metal acts)
3MP3.ru
$4.55 per month for unlimited downloads.
And you are not stuck with the typical iTMS low-quality 128Kbit file. Most of the Russian sites let you choose your quality and give you the option to do "online encoding" where you can select the settings you want. When the pop up screen shows up you can hit switch to advanced mode toward the bottm and you get the following options:
You can choose between the LAME or BLADE codec and 128, 160, 192, 256, and 320 kbps for each (constant bitrate). Or you can choose LAME variable bitrate at 128, 160, 192, or 256.
If you enjoy these services, 3MP3 should be your first stop to see if you can find what you are looking for at the lowest price. Then I'd move to allofmp3, followed by clubmp3.ru, and then DELit.
Cue the "In SOVIET RUSSIA" trolls now...
Da Blog
Otherwise he never would have said this:
I like microcars
Um, no. AAC is a lossy format. If you burn it to CD, then rip it and re-AAC it, you get something not quite as good as the original.
...but what would the fees be? Out of the reach of the small indie shops, or reasonable?
Poor talentless underdogs, my heart bleeds. If they can't afford DRM, they either shouldn't use it or they should start sucking less so they actually turn a profit. The iPod plays DRM-FREE MP3 files just fine.
Then again, why bother with DRM at all? My Dell Jukebox cost me less per GB, has a longer battery life, doesn't have any DRM, at least none that I'm aware of,
So it can play WMA but has no DRM support? That's like Satanism without the evil, it's totally pointless.
I don't get my sexuality questioned every time someone sees me use it.
Haven't had that problem... Considering the iPod has the majority of the portable audio marketshare, I highly doubt it comes into play as a factor in determining someone's sexuality. Now buying a pink mini and loading it with Ricky Martin's complete discography probably wouldn't help your case, but I digress.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
I guess this is why AAC was just recently chosen by the DVD consortium to be the standard for audio in the ROM portion of DVD-Audio disks. (That's been one of my major gripes with DVD-Audio -- you can't rip the songs to your computer currently, because there's no software out there designed to do this.)
Yeah, right, AAC is dead. Never mind that the latest iTunes rips into AAC by default. (You have to go into preferences to switch audio import to use MP3 instead.) Never mind that the iTunes Music Store outperforms all other legitimate digital music distribution methods, and their format of choice is AAC with FairPlay.
I guess that's why Quicktime is doing just fine? Seriously, talk about a reality distortion field -- yours seems to be worse than Steve Jobs'. Xvid and DiVX are still the purview of the 133t, although there are more DVD players on the market now that will play videos encoded in these formats. So they are gaining traction and mainstream acceptance; but most players that support these formats are cheapies from China, where video piracy is rampant, and the build quality leaves something to be desired.
Incidentally, AAC and Quicktime are linked inextricably with MPEG4, which is a current and future video standard. DiVX/Xvid leverage the MPEG4 standard.
Quicktime is not just a niche format. It's everywhere. Most sites that serve up movie trailers do so in Quicktime format. Quicktime is almost always offered as an option for sites that support multiple video formats. And AAC wasn't "created" by Apple -- it's an open standard that they adopted.
So what you're saying is that your entire post is really just an excuse to slam Jobs and Apple, and has nothing to do with anything else. Obviously. Since real facts don't bear your arguments out.
Funny, you sound like the Troll in this case. Pity I used up my moderator points a couple days ago.
And really, 99c for a song isn't even that great of a deal. That makes a 15 song cd = $15.
When you visit iTMS you will see that most albums having more than 10 tracks have prices capped at $9.99. Yes, there are counterexamples (Kitaro's "An Ancient Journey" is $18.81, the aggregate cost of the individual tracks), but they strike me as quite rare. I noticed a few albums are actually less than $9.99, and those have 9 or fewer tracks.
So, FYI, your blanket statement "That makes a 15 song CD = $15" is far more often incorrect than correct.
Every rule has an exception (except this one).
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
And as everyone has discovered who uses the service, iTMS isn't for buying albums. It's for buying singles. This way you get the one song you wanted on the album for $0.99 instead of $15, and that *is* a hell of a discount. Even if you find CD singles, they're much more than $0.99.
So for the majority of the world that (by definition) buys pop, iTMS makes sense. My wife just got 12 songs for $12 that would have cost over $100 in a store. I don't use it because I like older rock where 90% of an album didn't suck, but the service helps a large segment of the population.
They've left a tantalizing hint - if you look inside the iTunes application bundle, you'll see an icon for ogg files. It looks like they were at least considering supporting it enough to provide artwork. It's possible it supported it internally, but the feature might have been removed before shipping for some reason.
Really? So you can boot your Windows machine off of your Dell DJ, and troubleshoot your computer? Can you also transfer music and charge it at the same time off of one cord?
But you know what the real beauty of the iPod design is? It anin't much bigger than a cassette. How much longer before someone comes out with a car stereo that accepts your iPod like a tape? They're gonna get my money.
(tig)
Ignorance and prejudice and fear
Walk hand in hand
Nope. How about you let me handle this:
Note1: as you can see, Alex Salkelver at Business Week clearly didn't do his homework before writing that article.
Note2: the folks at Veridisc are astonishingly incompetent at e-business: they own neither veridisc.com (unrenewed, squatted, not work-safe) nor fairplay.com (unowned, parked)
Except that you typically get price breaks on the iTunes Music Store for buying entire albums. Albums typically sell for $9.99 on the store, which is way cheaper than buying each track individually if there are more than 10 tracks on the album. Also, some tracks are not available for individual download; one might argue that this is a ploy to force customers to buy the album, but typically such tracks are either bonus material or songs that probably wouldn't sell individually.
The latest trend on the iTunes Music Store is to give price breaks on buying an entire EP as well. In those cases, the cost of the EP is even cheaper than a full album, and often cheaper than buying the songs individually off the EP.
Disclaimer: Yes, I am a (satisfied) iTunes Music Store customer. However, I buy most music on CD and rip it the traditional way still.
Let's see...Apple puts only what you call an ineffective lock on the music you download, yet this is the reason you haven't signed up for iTunes?
What, are you waiting for a store to come out with *effective* protection which gives you even less of what you want? "Federal take-it-up-the-@$$" protection?
Apple has to put some kind of protection on their downloads to reassure the labels. You claim that it is only a token effort. Isn't that the best you can hope for? Sounds like Apple is slying doing you a favor, as opposed to the draconian measures they could be taking.
Interesting. However, I notice that there is also an iTunes-wma.icns, as well as the iTunes-ogg.icns you mention, and I don't think adding WMA support to the iPod is very likely...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Is it just me or has companies like Apple managed to sneak DRM in under our noses while at the same time tricking us into thinking they're cool?
And really, 99c for a song isn't even that great of a deal. That makes a 15 song cd = $15.... Which essencially is the same price it was before. Not only that but you end up with an inflexible lossy-encoded file.
If by "sneak" you mean "implement because without it the major labels would never have agreed to let Apple distribute any of their songs" and "trick" you mean "tell you up front that their files are 'protected' by the weakest/most flexible DRM available from any online store that carries works from the major labels", and if by "$15 per cd" you mean "$9.99 for the majority of the albums", then yes, you're absolutely correct.
I definitely think that Apple should license FairPlay to other online music stores, but not other hardware or software players just yet. Why? It's a matter of perception. I'm sure there are people out there who won't buy an iPod because they learn that it can only play iTMS songs (out of all the other legal download stores, ignoring any MP3 stores). If Wal*Mart and any other "me too" store also sold FairPlay music, all of a sudden this wouldn't be a problem--iPod users could buy online music from any number of places. iPod users would have a choice.
Now, would Apple lose some iTMS revenue? Probably, but big deal. iTMS is a loss-leader for selling iPod, which has been pointed out many times here before. I bet, though, that Apple would continue to be the industry leader in terms of selling songs to iPod users because they have such a clean, easy-to-use interface and seamless interoperability between the player, the store, and the iPod.This is something the standalone FairPlay licensee stores would not be able to offer. They could compete on price, or selection, which Apple competes based on ease-of-use and style (which would not be Mac vs. PC all over again because Apple would still control the iPod hardware).
So it would be win-win. Apple would have more stores selling music for its iPod, which would make consumers more comfortable in committing to iPods, and Apple would be able to maintain the near-excellent user experience for customers who stick with the iTMS.
Your favorite sig sucks
What if Apple not only licensed the DRM, (= more music = more iPods = more $) but also sold it in bundled with Xserve technology?
Make it so an Indy music producer just has to copy songs to a "publisher" program which encodes and makes available on-line.
They could spec a Xserve Music Server that an Indy music producer could buy (Xserve RAID etc) all pre-configured and easily managed (even sell remote management support so Apple supports the thing). They customize the variety of e-Commerce templates and copy music to a program that will encode it and add it to the library.
Now Apple can support Indys AND keep their own music library "clean".
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
Oh puh-leeze. Remind me to stay the hell away from any business you start: "The customer was using the product incorrectly! It's his fault! Who told you to use the music-sharing feature we provided! It was meant to be for demonstration purposes only!"
If Apple wants to succeed in the market, it has to provide the products its customers want. None of Apple's customers want a system that breaks after they replace a CPU three times. I have files generated on my first Apple computer (an Apple ][+, bought in 1979) that execute and are readable on my G4, which is approximately my millionth Apple computer. I have owned and discarded literally over a million dollars' worth of Apple equipment, if you count the machines I signed purchase orders when I was a sysadmin). The very idea that I should have to take a special step -- beyond *actually preserving my data* -- to preserve my data offends reason.
The fact is, one of Apple's best customers, a risk-taker willing to buy the 1.0 of everything they shipped, was burned by Apple's decision to include "features" that added cost (in engineering dollars) and removed functionality, at the behest of a trust of price-fixing record execs whom the FTC busted for being an illegal cartel.
Who does Apple need to please to sell hardware: Record executives or its customers?
Talk about fallacious reasoning.
There's also the trivial exercise of using iTunes to burn a CD then re-ripping the music. Of course the music has then been lossily encoded twice, with different encoders, so it's sorta like listening to a copy of a tape of a FM broadcast.
You haven't done this before, have you? The sound quality is lower, but it's not *that bad*. I would compare the original to CD quality and the re-ripped / twice-encoded version to FM radio quality (and really, no worse than most of the less common pirated MP3s floating around in cyberspace).
Here's what I noticed about the quality difference:
I started off with a song bought via iTunes... sounds great via my iPod and via the stereo connected to my PC. I burnt a playlist of my songs to CD. I then ripped the songs back into iTunes, encoding as 192kbps AAC. Playing back the song, it sounded just as good as the original... or so it seemed to me at first. I then played the original.... a-hah!... in a back-to-back comparison, the original sounds much better... but its not something you will really notice otherwise.
What, you mean like the new one from Alpine?
;)
Or something like what I'm working on with my Beetle . I'm integrating the dock into the dashboard
Hey freaks: now you're ju
And Apple also licenses the MPEG-4 file format, which is based on their own QuickTime file format.
My video compression blog
Like Apple's DRM is worth a shit. It's as effective at protecting songs as my goldfish is at protecting my house. When anyone can defeat it by burning & reripping, what's the point? Really, why even bother?
this is actually a point Steve Jobs made to the music industry execs (according to an interview with Jobs online somewhere, I forget where). He told them that any DRM is basically useless, anything that can be encoded can be cracked. they told him to piss off, a year or so later he came back when all their drm schemes were cracked and he said "See?!" Then they listened.
so apple put in a bare minimum protection scheme, but more importantly made the terms so loose that nobody really wants to or needs to crack it. the restrictions are pretty insignificant (can't burn the same playlist more than 10x.... but change it slightly and keep going. But who's going to burn the same playlist that many times anyway?). the whole setup basically a fig leaf so that the industry can *feel* protected while raking in the bucks.
the real protection here is the easy terms that don't stop you from doing what you want to. iTMS is excellent competition to Kazaa & crew: faster, better, more reliable, decently tagged, good catalog, cheap. Apple got tired of waiting for the industry to figure out how to do it right, and did it for them.
so what exactly is your problem with iTunes?
Even if licensing out the iTMS format to other online music stores would theoretically drive more people to buy iPods, there's one factor that everyone's forgetting: user experience.
Apple doesn't want just any joe schmoe with a smelly t-shirt selling songs for the iPod because Apple wants to maintain a level of quality with the entire user experience, from the purchase of songs on iTMS to the browsing of their songs on iTunes to the uploading and management to the seamless integration between the store and iTunes.
It works for crack.
InstantCool
If Apple wants to succeed in the market, it has to provide the products its customers want.
Wrong.
If Apple wants to succeed in this market, they have to provide a reasonable compromise between the consumers and the content providers.
What do I want as a consumer? Free music downloads, no DRM, unlimited duplication and unrestricted usage rights.
What do content providers want? $15 for 10 songs on a CD, most of which are filler, with limited use and no duplication rights.
iTMS is groundbreaking because it was the first service to broker an acceptible compromise between consumers and content providers. Yes, there will always be the Coreys of the world whose needs are the exception rather than the rule. The only way to adress that is to offer an unrestricted agreement, which does not benefit the content providers at all.
The incentive is that the songs would play on other devices... The drm would be open, the songs could be on any device, or software audio player that supported the drm.
"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?" - Albert Einstein
Oh yeah, AAC won the listening test over here too : http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/9217
/. at great length. If you look at the "winners", you will see that none of them "won" by a greater margin than their inherent error bars or confidence measures. Therefore it is incorrect and unsupported to say that any particular codec "won". Have you ever taken elementary stats?
You know these particular "results" were discussed recently in
Da Blog
Nah, I'd just question their intelligence.
"the whole setup basically a fig leaf so that the industry can *feel* protected while raking in the bucks."
More to the point, DRM is like a "club" for your car's steering wheel, or copy protection on PC software. It won't stop the people who are really determined to pirate music or software, or steal your car, but it stops the casual folks. If it can reduce much of the piracy, but not all of it, it's still worthwhile. The music industry's lawsuits have the same aim: if they can scare the masses away from piracy, they're better off even though the Slashdot crowd is simply moving to transfer mediums that are off the RIAA's radar or otherwise untouchable.
As an aside, I think Apple's DRM is fine. I can burn extra CDs for my friends and move tracks from PC to PC. It would not let me simply copy the tracks to my Kazaa share directory, which is fine, as that would be illegal anyway. The "artists have too many rights" crowd who see any sort of DRM as an affront to everything that is good and true and right in the world should check themselves.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
the whole setup basically a fig leaf so that the industry can *feel* protected while raking in the bucks.
No.
A deadbolt protects your house by making it physically difficult for the bad guys to break in. That's true.
But a "beware of dog" sign also protects your house. How? By deterring those who would otherwise walk right in and take your stuff. It doesn't do anything to stop a determined thief... but how many determined thieves are there out there, compared to the number of "thieves of opportunity?"
Fairplay protects music because it deters "thieves of opportunity." Because it's inconvenient to pirate Fairplay-protected music, paired with the fact that it's so darned easy to get it legally, Fairplay effectively protects music.
It's not a fig leaf. It's real.
My problem is that I don't have an interface to it. I'd love to see Apple release an iTunes for Linux. Short of that, I'd like to see a web interface to iTunes that supported Mozilla well. Short of that, I'd like to see someone license iTMS and build a third-party web interface to iTMS.
Doug Alcorn