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iPod Users Buy CDs, Shun iTunes

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the what-part-of-"my-music"-do-you-not-understand? dept.

twitter writes, "The BBC's summarizes a Jupiter Research study, 'iPod fans shunning iTunes store.' From the article: '83% of iPod owners do not buy digital music regularly... only 5% of the music on an iPod will be bought from online music stores. The rest will be from CDs the owner of an MP3 player already has or tracks they have downloaded from file-sharing sites... [T]he only salient characteristic shared by all owners of portable music players was that they were more likely to buy more music — especially CDs.' This is despite years of iTunes promotion and apparent success. Given the outright failure of other music services, it is clear that users prefer DRM-free music, and are willing to pay for it and take the trouble to rip it."

16 of 550 comments (clear)

  1. DRM is a hassle by BWJones · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is exactly what I have been doing since the beginning of iTunes. DRM on my music simply does not satisfy for a number of reasons including 1) quality (I can tell the difference). 2) It's a hassle to have to deal with the inability of others on my subnet to not be able to listen to (share) the DRM encoded songs. 3) I already had a huge amount of music on CD and have relied on ripping to iTunes as a back up means.

    Interestingly, iTunes has increased my music purchases significantly, though on CD,

    --
    Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
    1. Re:DRM is a hassle by Nutsquasher · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Yeah, I've bought more CD's now than before not because of iTunes, but because of Pandora.com. Points 1, 2, and 3 are very valid. Also, you're unable to resell your iTunes music collection if you wish.

      I find it odd how I'm so anti-iTunes due to the stated reasons, but I'm more than willing to buy games on Xbox Live Arcade, seeing as they fit within similar restrictions. Well, only if they're original and not repackaged retro-games I've played to death.

      It probably has to do with the fact that Xbox Live Arcade games are only available through a restricted medium, where I can bypass iTunes and buy a non-DRMed CD and Vorbis it.

    2. Re:DRM is a hassle by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      DRM on my music simply does not satisfy for a number of reasons including 1) quality (I can tell the difference).

      When is this faux-audiophile bullshit going to end. DRM does not change the sound of music. It does not sound any different.

      A DRMd 128kbps AAC file decrypts and uncompresses to the exact same waveform as a non-DRMd 128kbps AAC file. It sounds just as bad.

      A DRMd lossless format decrypts and uncompresses to the exact same waveform as a non-DRMd lossless file. It sounds just as good.

      You cannot tell the difference between a DRMd file and a non DRMd file all else being equal. End of story, no argument, thank you take the next gate out of here.

    3. Re:DRM is a hassle by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      lol. If you had ears worth a damn you would know that encryption of any kind irreversibly changes the data being streamed through it, and thus causes a definite change in the sound. I don't know the exact reasons for it, but you cannot deny that the data is being changed. According to Quantum theory anyway, you cannot help but change something like the resulting wave form simply by observing it, and you NEED to observe it in order to change it into an encrypted form, and then again in order to apply the unencryption key.

      In my experience it changes the music in odd ways different to the changes that compression cause. It gives a bass that's more harsh, and increases the midrange while levelling out in the high end. That's an issue totally separate to what happens when you compress with AAC or MP3 or whatever. If you want to test, make an mp3 and then make two identical copies of the file. Run one of the resulting compressed files through an encryption utility (it doesn't have to be Apple's fairplay, even sending it via PGP email will do) and then decrypt it. Play the never-encrypted file and play the encrypted then decrypted file one after another, you'll easily tell the difference.

    4. Re:DRM is a hassle by Yaztromo · · Score: 5, Insightful
      ol. If you had ears worth a damn you would know that encryption of any kind irreversibly changes the data being streamed through it, and thus causes a definite change in the sound.

      This is the biggest load of crap I've read on /. in a long time. Congratulations!

      Encryption makes the data appear pseudo-random, however the decryption will return the bits, before they are inserted into the audio buffer, to the exact same state they were in prior to encryption.

      Your own test bears this out -- just do a comparison of the resulting files. The computer has no way of knowing that the "encrypted" file was ever even encrypted (as you aren't replacing the bits -- you're duplicating them). If you can hear a difference, it's only because the voices in your head are getting louder. Or maybe your tinfoil hat is askew.

      Yaz.

    5. Re:DRM is a hassle by cskrat · · Score: 5, Insightful

      PGP is a lossless encryption whereas fairplay uses a watermark technique. Big difference in algorithms and quantum theory has nothing to do with it.

      The difference between a DRM'd song and one that you rip yourself is an issue of control. With iTunes you are stuck with 128kbps AAC encoded by their in house encoding/DRM software. When you rip a song yourself you have the option of using any one of myriad different encoders, algorithms, bitrates, configurations, and etc. I usually use 240-355 VBR WMA encoding for personal use.

      Personally I've only purchased one album from iTunes (unfortunatly I can no longer play it because I've changed computers too many times) and while their encoding method is fine for listening through earbuds, it shows noticable degredation vs. PCM on my 7.1 home theater setup. But it has nothing to do with watermarking DRM and it definately has nothing to do with quantum theory and schrodinger's cat, it is all about the bitrate and the encoding software. And Apple uses a substandard encoder set to a bitrate that is almost pallatable to AOL dial-up customers.

      --
      My God! It's full of eval()'s.
    6. Re:DRM is a hassle by BWJones · · Score: 5, Informative

      DRM does not change the sound of music. It does not sound any different.

      No, but I cannot purchase from the iTMS songs that are encoded at higher rates. That was my point.

      --
      Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
    7. Re:DRM is a hassle by Rix · · Score: 5, Funny

      Ssh.

      It may not be rational, but if it gets the plebes to opose DRM, it's good for everyone in the long run.

    8. Re:DRM is a hassle by wordsnyc · · Score: 5, Funny

      It's homeopathy! The bits remember being encrypted!

      --
      Sent from the iPad I found in your car.
    9. Re:DRM is a hassle by Yaztromo · · Score: 5, Informative
      Of course the computer will identify them as being the same, its job is to work with discrete components in the form of bits, where the human ear can hear on a lower level than that. I'm no digital maven, so I can't say the EXACT reason why, but I've been selling, repairing and setting up high end audio systems for 17 years. It's my job to know what sounds the same and what sounds different. Perhaps the bits themselves are longer or shorter than before encryption, or perhaps they're a bit (pun intended) higher voltage where a computer will still read it as a "1" when it's in a bass waveform, therefore things like md5sum will claim it's the same file, but if you knew anything about signals over a wire you'd know things like a waveform that can be represented digitally can look (and sound) very different depending on the size of the peaks and troughs.

      As it happens, I know quite a bit about digital signaling. I also know that that "bit" you're reading is going to be converted several times from when you read it fro the hard disk, by a variety of independent subsystems which set their own bit levels as high or low, based on their own signaling specifications.

      You read some bits off your hard drive. The bits sitting on your drive have no voltage -- they're simply a magnetic field. This field get translated into either a 1 or a 0 bit. The drive controller copies this into a voltage that it then transmits across the drive bus to a bus controller. This bus controller then copies the bit to the system bus. The system bus copies it to the CPU, which copies it to RAM, which is then refreshed thousands of times per second. This is then copied back onto the system bus, and send to your audio hardware, which feeds it through a DAC.

      Each of these transmissions is a copy operation on the bit -- not on the strength of the magnetic field, or whatever voltage was being applied to the transmitting component. So signaling in this case makes no difference -- so long as each field or voltage fits within the proper tolerances, it will be treated as a 1 or a 0, and will be raised high or low at the new voltage level as a completely new signal during each conversion. As such, it isn't the case that if the bit is magnetically weak on your hard drive that it will have a lower-than-normal voltage once it finally gets into RAM.

      Thinking of it another way, it isn't like using a tin-can-and-string telephone to transmit data. It's more like the telephone game, where someone says something to someone, who then tells the message to the next person, and so on until the recipient receives the message. It doesn't matter if the first speaker is male or female -- the last person to pass on the message is going to state the same message regardless, in their own voice. The only difference in the case of a computer is that most stages have integrity checking to verify that the message is received properly, and in some cases can either request a retransmission if the integrity checking fails, or can receive the data in a manner that it can be reconstructed with mathematical certainty by using appropriate data encodings.

      Encryption makes no difference. The system is not analogue -- it is digital. And the system only knows two digits. Each individual subsystem has completely different mechanisms for representing those bits, and that representation is completely independent of other subsystems. Reading an encrypted block from your hard drive causes the encrypted data to be copied into RAM, from which a decrypted copy is placed into RAM. This copy is generated electrically in exactly the same fashion if it had been read unencrypted from the hard drive. By the time it gets to the audio DAC, the data is identical from both a data and a signaling standpoint.

      I'm sure you can handily replace the needle on a record player arm, but you know absolutely squat about digital signaling.

      Yaz.

    10. Re:DRM is a hassle by Redlazer · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Perhaps the reason youre more willing to suffer the same problem with Xbox Live Arcade is because its a different application, a different type of entertainment.

      Music and games are entertainment, but they fill different facets of the entertainment genre.

      Also, a video game seems "worth" more to the average person - you can get more out of it. A song is entertaining for the 3 minutes its playing.

      -Red

      --
      Guns don't kill people, "with glowing hearts" kills people.
  2. but I already have a TON of CD's by marz007 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why do I need to buy all those again, if I buy, I'll probably buy via iTunes, but I've got a large catalog already purchased. This isn't shunning.

  3. Who would've thought? by Opportunist · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So appearantly the majority prefers freedom over convenience? Well, at least it keeps my hopes up for humanity.

    --
    We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  4. 1.5 Billion Songs != Shunning by thefinite · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "Shunning" is such a silly word to use for this. Just because the iTunes store has not entirely replaced the CD in its few years of existence does not mean that users are shunning it. Their business is growing faster than CD sales are growing. Steve Jobs even said in the recent Apple Event that they are the first music downloads store to crack the top five sellers of music in any form. He also said they are now passing the 1.5 BILLION song mark.

    But I guess no one will read an article that says "iPod users gradually adopting iTunes Music Store to supplement CD sales."

    --
    Boom Shanka
  5. magnatune.com by steveha · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If you would like to buy music from an online store, but you don't want DRM and you want top quality, check out magnatune.com. They let you download CD-quality (either as uncompressed wave files, or as FLAC), MP3, or Ogg Vorbis. And you can listen to everything before you buy. (128 kbps MP3, lower quality than you get when you pay.)

    Not only do they not have DRM, but they encourage you to give away up to three copies of the music you buy, as a form of advertising.

    They have a sliding scale on prices: you can choose what you want to pay, within a reasonable range. (I just checked, and at least for the album I checked, the range was from $5 to $18.) If you only like one song on an album, pay less for the album. If you really want to encourage an artist to make more albums, pay more. That's cool.

    When you buy an album, the artist gets 50% of whatever you pay. Not 50% of the profits, and then they cook the books so they "don't have any profits"... 50% of the gross income. That's outstanding. I love their slogan: "We are not evil."

    I have no connection to them, other than being a satisfied customer.

    steveha

    --
    lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
  6. Playing devil's advocate... by supersat · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I agree that DRM'ed music should sound no different, but let me play devil's advocate for a minute.

    It might be possible that the decryption algorithm introduces some jitter by taking a varying amount of time to decrypt a chunk of data. A poorly-engineered system might pass this jitter through to the DAC, resulting in degraded audio quality. It might also be possible that the decryption operations cause the CPU to introduce additional noise on the power rails, which might also impact audio quality in a poorly-engineered system.

    So, I don't think it's impossible that DRM affects sound quality. I'm just not convinced that it actually does.