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MP3tunes Offers Music Service Without DRM
ThinSkin writes "Former MP3.com chief and Lindows CEO Michael Robertson will reenter the music world next week with MP3tunes, a service that promises music without DRM restrictions. MP3tunes hopes to attract users who are fed up with restrictions on copying music from sites that use digital-rights-management techniques, such as iTunes."
I can't wait to download normal music that normal people actually want from the five major US record labels!
*Cough*
Anyone can do music without DRM.
Can they do music people want?
Spare me the arguments about how "it's not really what people want" because it's force-fed by Clear Channel, the labels, and a corrupt industry, and people just *think* they want it. Believe it or not, some artists on major labels have talent. Some don't. *Gasp!* Some completely unknown, independent artists may have talent, but might never have that talent shaped as well as it could be in the hands of professionals - and by "professionals", I don't mean music industry shills, I mean people who have done this for ages. Perhaps there are some bands out there who have the musical talent, business prowess, and personal presence to pull it off themselves. And maybe you think Open Source and "music/information wants to be free" socialistic type ideas - not using that in the pejorative sense - is the way to go. Fine. But the fact of the matter is that the MAJOR labels will demand DRM, unless one of them rolls (very unlikely), or a new paradigm takes over. Sure, maybe a DRMless music store will be part of that new paradigm. But at least realize that the vast majority of people won't give a shit about the vast majority of music on a DRMless service.
Do any of us like or want DRM? Hell no. But some of us realize that it's an extremely imperfect solution to a partly perceived, partly real problem. And, right or wrong, it's frankly their content to protect and do with as they see fit, as recognized under our system of laws as set forth by our elected officials, regardless of whose pockets you think they're in. If you are the ultimate cynic, and think everything is shot as it is, then you'll likely not understand any of this at all, or the fundamental desire of people to protect and secure their property or things they have invested in, no matter how unbalanced YOU might think it seems. But no one is forcing you to buy or listen to major label music. No one is forcing to you buy an iPod or use iTunes. Perhaps some of you put your money where your mouth is, but most of you are hypocrites. And the worst among you are those who think you can steal things who don't belong to you. And yes, it is stealing. An apt excerpt:
[...] different types of stealing are covered by different laws because they differ in the details. Theft through breaking and entering: burglary. Theft from one's employer: embezzlement. Theft by committing fraud through the mail: the aptly named mail fraud. Theft by the unlawful copying of somebody else's property: copyright infringement.
And the "deprivation" argument is pure shit, so don't even go there.
I wish them luck. I really do. I'd love to have no DRM on all of my video, television, movies, music, and be able to use things I *bought* any way I see fit on any device at any time. No broadcast flag, no forced no-commercial-skip, no DRM.
But I'm also practical.
That, and not a, you know, moron.
But will they offer OGG/Vorbis downloads? Seriously, I bought the most expensive mp3 player around so I could listen to my extensive, legal music collection in Vorbis. I don't want to spend my time writing a shell script to convert my mp3s to Vorbis, so is there any chance of MP3Tunes offerning OGG downloads? BTW, I had a Vorbis listening party the other night, and I invited all my female friends [robots] to listen. They all noticed the difference between my 128kB/s OGG files and my 64kB/s MP3 files. Up with OGG/Vorbis!
I, for one, would use this. I hope we can prove that it's a successful idea to have a service which actually puts the trust back in the customer rather than treating them as potential criminals.
I like many others are happy to pay for music, its just there's no way I can BUY music online that isn't crippled. I'd rather buy a CD and rip it.
Jolyon
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
Can't this guy name a product without ripping off some other product?
Since just about every song anybody would want that is available on most pay services is also on P2P networks, what's the harm of removing DRM? People pay these sites for convenience. All these songs are available elsewhere, but it's more difficult to find and download all the songs on an album on edonkey or kazaa. So all they are doing is annoying their customers, since even if these songs did make it on a P2P network, it wouldn't make much of a difference.
So services like this that sell songs without DRM shouldn't be a threat to the industry.
If DRM upsets you that much, you can get a wav/mp3 writer plugin for your audio player and roll your own DRMless copy. If this isn't possible with your media player, I'm sure there are special drivers and tools out there (you know, like Windows Sound Recorder).
I swear, people are never satisfied. Apple is doing a great thing, but people will always find something to complain about.
Honestly, I can't see most people caring enough about DRM to leave one service that uses one application to encompass the buying, listening, streaming and loading experience.
Sorry. I just don't see it. iTunes is doing better than ever, and may well have reached critical mass by this point. I've never hearde one person complain about the DRM - except here on Slashdot.
I think he's probably right, but I wonder if the bigwigs at the record labels are willing (or even care) to listen to his argument. It's not as if Apple didn't try:
I think the general consensus is that even though Jobs and his "Ph.D.s" knew DRM is always crackable, Apple still needed to implement some form of DRM in order to convince the record labels to open their catalogs. For the record companies in April of 2003, ever chary of the Internet, DRM was non-negotiable.
My question is: what's changed since then that would cause them to reconsider? After all, iTunes has shown that a service offering DRM tracks can be wildly successful. So why would the record labels want to open their catalogs to a DRM-free solution from some dude who made his name pawning a Linux desktop?
Anyway, this is definitely something to watch. I sincerely wish him luck. I just hope he can get the labels to open their catalogs.
MP3tunes will use a service or tool called "MP3beamer", which Robertson said would reconcile the need to store music in a centralized file store with the ability to play back the music anywhere, on any device. He declined to comment further.
(From TFA, for those who didn't R it)
If this service stores music somewhere you must somehow log into, and does not -upload to you- a DRM-free MP3, this service is NOT free of DRM, just using a different version of it.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
This is not a new concept. It's already alive and well over at emusic.com. The selection is not great, but you get 50 to 80 high-quality MP3's with NO DRM for a flat monthly fee.
MP3tunes will use a service or tool called "MP3beamer", which Robertson said would reconcile the need to store music in a centralized file store with the ability to play back the music anywhere, on any device.
Any ideas what this might be? Google isn't very forthcoming, as I suspect there's little info available as yet. If it's a "required" (aka installed) program, will it:
Just curious.
I wish more music services would follow this example.
Of course, I also wish every music site out there used their pay by the megabyte approach, at ridiculously low rates. I actually end up spending much more on music, because I'm not afraid to waste a dollar getting a few new albums. It's proof that cheap, DRM-free online distribution can work.
It's called magnatune and I've been shopping there for months.
How long until Michael offers us "mp3 lockers" so he doesn't even have to pay his own artists for downloads anymore?
"I swear, people are never satisfied. Apple is doing a great thing, but people will always find something to complain about."
/. and tell us that a G4 is fast enough for you.
Congrats. You've managed to state stupid apple fanboi reason #1 without a hint of irony or sarcasm.
You're serious.
Therefore, you win this week's Apple Fanboi of the Week award.
This entitles you to pick the Powerbook of your choice, pay full price, and then you get to come on
So (one of) your problems with the iTunes Music Store is that it doesn't give very much money to the artists. Your solution to this is to get it illegally without paying them anything? That's your compassion? If you want to screw artists and labels over, then by all means screw them over. Just don't lie about it to yourself.
Why not go out and support indie labels and the bands they have? Bands like The Shins, The Postal Service, Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros, Porcupine Tree, and Iron & Wine are all more than deserving of your dollar.
P.S. Downhill Battle encourages piracy. They care nothing about the artists, and seemingly, neither do you.
Etiquette is etiquette. He kills his mother but he can't wear grey trousers.
Here I am reading an article about my former CEO when I stumble upon this line:
At the show, two of Robertson's engineers at MP3.com will introduce SwitchVox, which will
combine PBX features with VOIP...
Oh crap that's me! Yeah, we have a fancy-pants gui front-end to asterisk. At the risk of further slashdotting ourselves, here's the site: http://www.switchvox.com.
Now to go find some bandwidth.
Ya know what? Everyone loves to bash allofmp3.com bc it's Russian and shady. Well ... so what. You want shady? The US firms are a legal mafia outfit. Think about it. They control all avenues worth controlling (radio, advertising, production, etc.) and if you start to encroach on them they make you an offer you can't refuse. Either they buy you out, sue you into oblivion, or both (think mp3.com).
Aside from that I read on their site that some money actually does go to the artist. Not much, and I have no way of verifying that, but take a wild guess how much of that is *my* problem. There are middlemen taking a cut here and in Russia, the difference is here they take a bigger cut and the listener gets screwed worse, whereas the Russians take a smaller cut and the artist gets screwed worse. Take another wild guess why ppl love the Russian site so much.
So yeah, if I ever meet the guys from Social Distortion (which is very possible since I cruise bars in LA a lot) I'll buy them a beer or 5. But don't you dare expect me to cry for them Argentina. I sitting here with a crappy new haircut in "business casual" looking at an hour+ commute home to an apartment. Let them bear the brunt of the industry's greed.
I agree with pretty much everything you've just said.
The only credit I give to this project is the credit that Michael Robertson can cause a big enough stir to give it a chance of being noticed.
You're right about the labels demanding DRM. I think the only true way to escape it is to get the artists to migrate away from the labels.
They can obviously have more freedom without them. The only obstacles are exposure and money. Those are pretty much intertwined. Get those up to par and it will work.
It's gotta start somewhere.
For what's it's worth, most of us Clear Channel programmers would love to have deep, eclectic playlists loaded with interesting songs and artists.
The problem is that not enough people would listen to our stations for us to keep the lights on.
We're not force-feeding anything. Our short playlists are dictated by the market, and we spend million each year researching the musical tastes of our various target audiences.
While people bitch and wail about short playlists, the fact is that when we exercise poor music discipline, our ratings generally decline. Since commercial broadcasting is still predicated on a free radio, advertiser-subsidized model, low rated stations go away pretty quickly. We're a publicly held company, and have to return value to the stockholders (this could mean you).
We know tight playlists aren't for everyone, but they're for *most* people. Amazing as it may seem, radio listeners actually like hearing their favorites on a regular basis. Adults, in particular, punch out more often than not when something new comes on -- no matter how good it is.
Real music enthusiasts with well-developed tastes have a lot of options open to them these days, if they don't mind paying for them. Hell, I own an iPod, too. But free radio is still out there, playing the hits, ready whenever you need a pop fix or breaking news.
Okay, flame away. But that's the deal.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
steal:
1 a : to take or appropriate without right or leave and with intent to keep or make use of wrongfully b : to take away by force or unjust means c : to take surreptitiously or without permission d : to appropriate to oneself or beyond one's proper share
Copyright infringement is copyright infringement. More broadly, and correctly, in my personal opinion, it is also stealing. Just like embezzlement is embezzlement. But in a more generic sense, it's also "stealing". I'm not talking statutes here. I'm talking ethics and morals. And by my understanding of the English language and the meanings of words, copyright infringement is a form of "stealing".
It amazes me how people always want pre-existing laws and legal principles to apply to the internet, or technology, or information if it is in their own favor or somehow benefits them, and then go out of their way to make crazy rationalizations about how downloading things that don't belong to you and that you didn't pay for isn't "stealing", it's "copyright infringement" simply because it's been duplicated, with complete ignorance of the ease that one work can be distributed globally in literally hours with virtually no work by any interim party, and no considerations for the owner's rights, not to mention what a horribly pathetic and downright destructive ethic that is encouraged by taking things without permission simply because YOU think they're too expensive or YOU don't agree with how business X has done Y or Z; and since copyright = bad or favors the corrupt and powerful, you personally find it invalid, and therefore, it's "okay" to infringe against copyrights owned by big, evil, blood-sucking, money-grubbing corporations.
Do I have that about right?
I wish it wasn't Robertson that was at the head of all of this, because I would always like a non-DRM music service to succeed. But Robertson got to where he is (insanely rich) by stepping on everyone else back in the late 90s. For example, he did things like stealing tons of bandwidth from a university FTP search project (which, at the time, was at ftpsearch.ntnu.no) and putting it on his "filez.com" site to sell advertising there, never giving any credit to the people who created the search. He also squatted audiograbber.com (Audiograbber being the name of a now well-known CD ripping program... at the time it was still up and coming) and for a long time refused to sell it to the creator of the software, instead directing it to MP3.com where he was advertising for competing programs. I could go on and on. He's just an ass who exploits people. I ran one of the larger MP3 sites around the time when MP3.com was still new (when it was just a garbage list of software, without any real content of its own), and so I managed to talk to him a few times back then. When I took my site down he was waiting like a vulture to buy it up and forward it to MP3.com, but I wouldn't sell...
Do I have that about right?
Not in my estimation, no. Let me dispense with something immediately: I don't think copying is OK because *I* think something is too expensive, or *I* am morally offended by corporate practices, or any other rationale that justifies copying as a form of civil disobedience or protest. These reasons only underscore my thinking, but are not the basis for it.
crazy rationalizations about how downloading things that don't belong to you and that you didn't pay for isn't "stealing"
These things don't belong to me, true, but they do belong (in my book of ethics) to the person providing them (the file sharer). And the file sharer is providing them freely, and, I would argue, ought to be able to. I am receiving what they are offering.
I am not sneaking into their computer, or making an image surrepitiously--I am making an image of an image they are freely providing. And they, in turn, HAVE paid a consideration to the original creators by buying the thing from a retailer. Or if not them, then the person who freely provided THEM with the image may have, or the one before them, or whoever. The point is that the work was not swiped from the artist (in this example), but purchased, or bartered, or obtained by whatever agreement the two parties entered into. If the store says to have this CD you need to fork over $15, then fine, those are the terms, and to take it otherwise IS stealing. But notice that, likewise, at every point down the file sharing chain, the file sharer and file seeker are similarly freely entering into an agreement of transaction regarding something the sharer now controls.
I have no moral qualms with this arrangement whatsover. I know it's illegal, but not, in my book, immoral.
The key here is control. The artist surrenders control to the publisher. The publisher surrenders control, partially, to the consumer. The part they do not surrender is, at least according to the law, the right to distribute. But ought they be able to withhold that right? What does the consumer's consideration actually buy them? A license? (..and all attendant complications with that?) And why does the publisher's right of control trump the consumer's rights of control? And what happens when the publishers, in their efforts to retain control inadvertantly, impact other consumer rights, weakly called "fair use," but more broadly, what ought to be my right as a consumer to manipulate, transform, transfer or otherwise with something I bought?
None of this even touches the problems a sibling poster notes about the artificial creation of scarcity copyright protection produces, given that, yes, reproduction of information has vanishing marginal cost, and, shitty as it may be to you, there is not material deprivation of the producer (sorry, but it's true).
This is simply about control. Control of the product by the seller or buyer after a sale.
If I don't look at a billboard - it's theft. If I don't watch a commercial - it's theft. If I don't visit my local music store - it's theft. If I post a negative review of an album - it's theft. If I simply state a negative opinion of an artist themselves - it's theft. If I don't provide my kids with enough allowance - it's theft.
Potential sales do not equate to theft.
Nor can you reasonably assume each downloaded copy would have otherwise been a purchase. Nor can you reasonably assume that no downloaded copies lead to later purchases.... or lead to additional purchases beyond the material downloaded.
But again - potential purchases do not equate to theft.
You have bought into the idea that copyright is for-profit, inherently, and primarily. This is a relatively new notion, really. In fact, if you go back and read the prime mover behind copyright in the first place, it was all about something I mentioned above: the public good. Profit was strictly a secondary concern. Specifically, the primary concern was to incentivize artists to release their work so the public could enjoy it.
Many people know this in their heart, but haven't heard it expressed or read the relevant laws. But in essence what everyone wants is for the artists to make a living, and for tons of people to enjoy their music however they like. But somehow, we've moved past that into this realm where we want to defend an artist making a living, a middleman making millions of dollars, and limiting our audience to the music as much as possible (yes, I consider selling a $0.10 CD in a store for $18 a crime).
Essentially, my position (I won't speak for NoData anymore) boils down to the argument that the artists has every right to make a living. But if the artist makes a living (even a modest one), the public should be able to enjoy the artist's work. For those that cannot afford the $18, there is no case of a lost sale, there is no money lost, there is only gain.
This is the system that should exist. The real querstion is: how do we get there from here? There may be no way, but one thing is certain in my mind: things are not OK the way they are. We live in a time where there are plenty of us to pay for CDs, and those that cannot can still enjoy the music.
Rush might have put it best:
Begin the day
With a friendly voice
A companion, unobtrusive
Plays that song that's so elusive
And the magic music makes your morning mood
Off on your way
Hit the open road
There is magic at your fingers
For the spirit ever lingers
Undemanding contact
In your happy solitude
Invisible airwaves
Crackle with life
Bright antennae bristle
With the energy
Emotional feedback
On a timeless wavelength
Bearing a gift beyond price ---
Almost free...
All this machinery
Making modern music
Can still be open-hearted
Not so coldly charted
It's really just a question
Of your honesty
One likes to believe
In the freedom of music
But glittering prizes
And endless compromises
Shatter the illusion
Of integrity
For the words of the profits
Are written on the studio wall,
Concert hall ---
Echoes with the sounds...
Of salesmen.
This was written in 1980, long before MP3's, the internet, or P2P. But all the ideas are there, and more. In fact, Neil even alludes to the two freedoms that we commonly mention in regards to free software; he talks of both free in price, but also freedom to be artistic in your music without "selling out". But his final stab, after verses about comprimising to make a buck, is that the whole industry, from the studios to the concert halls, is not about the artist, and it's not about the audience. It's all about the salesman.
Defend the system all you want, but it's broken, and it's been broken for 25 years, at least. It's time to move on and get something better, not take the latest crop of problems and blame them on peer to peer file sharing.