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Jobs Says People Don't Want to 'Rent' Music
eldavojohn writes "PhysOrg is running a piece on a recent speech by Apple CEO Steve Jobs about DRM free music. While we know that Jobs is a self proclaimed proponent of DRM free music who's not all talk, he's now said that 'by the end of this year, over half of the songs we offer on iTunes we believe will be in DRM-free versions. I think we're going to achieve that.' Jobs pointed out what's obvious to us, the consumers, but isn't obvious to the music industry — 'People want to own their music.' He also dismissed subscription based music as a failure, and claimed a lot of other music labels are intrigued by the EMI deal."
Jobs also sent out a memo yesterday to all content providers letting them know that any and *all* of them could sign up to provide DRM-free and higher qaulity downloads from May onwards. Hopefully Nettwerk and similar labels will sign up for this, and the remaining major labels either follow suit or get forced out of the music business. Its good to see iTS (and the Amazon store) making steps towards a sensible sales model.
iTunes sold one BILLION songs; Stop repeating that RIAA FUD.
You can't take the sky from me...
While eMusic is technically a subscription based service it is unlike every other "subscription" based provider. You keep your emusic mp3s as long as you want. You don't lose your library because you stopped paying a monthly fee. You simply can't download new music once you've cancelled your subscription.eMusic is considered to be the #2 player in the online music business, and they're subscription based. You can argue how much of eMusic's #2-ness is because of DRM backlash, or favoring independent labels, or whatever, but eMusic is proof that subscriptions are not a deal-breaker, and certainly not failures. And before anyone confuses the subject, subscription != rental. Once a credit goes towards a track on eMusic (citing them as that's what I'm familiar with), you get to download that from wherever you want, as many times as you want, and you can do whatever you want with the file.
http://nyamenation.org/
Yes, but you do not own the right to resell the music. Thus, the legal definition is not that of ownership; you are, indeed, licensing it.
The First-sale doctrine, which is both case and codified law, says otherwise.
The first-sale doctrine has not been tested at the supreme court level in relation to downloaded music, but this is one case in which a conservative court is more likely to side against the record industry. The law says what it says; you'd have to be one of those so-called "activist" judges to read something into it other than what's on paper and side with the RIAA.
DRM-free purchased songs are "owned" under the law. Heck, so are DRM'd songs; you just can't legally break the DRM for resale purposes, making the first-sale doctrine moot.
Perhaps you don't realize that CDs are downsampled—lossily—to cram the original audio signal into a 44.1kHz, 16-bit stereo stream?
When the iTunes music store opened, it was announced that they'd be going back to the original masters to encode the AACs, instead of ripping from CDs. As I understand it, this means it's entirely possible for an AAC at 256kbps to be more faithful to the original signal than would be the equivalent Red Book-compliant CD.
It does seem that the AACs from the iTS are sampled at 44.1kHz, which lends your concern some relevance. But don't attempt to draw such a sharp distinction between "lossy" and "lossless" when the "lossless" to which you refer is, in fact, also lossy, and a cruder type of lossy at that.
Make Slashdot readable! See journal.
Uncompressed music would be nice, but not because AAC is "Apple's" AAC.
AAC as used by Apple is part of the MPEG-4 standard. Apple didn't invent it and doesn't own it.
All digital music, with the exception of purely synthesized stuff, has to pass through an analog-to-digital conversion process that throws away information (quantizing). So "uncompressed music" is still actually compressed -- and lossy-compressed at that -- if it's in digital form. The question has never been compressed vs. uncompressed, but rather what type and level of information loss you find acceptable.
I'm happy with a compression format that is not encumbered with lots of onerous license terms (i.e., that I could write and distribute an open-source player for if I felt like it) and that produces quality slightly better than the point at which I can hear the difference on a good stereo system. The "slightly better" simply so that if I get an even better stereo system later on, I still won't hear the difference. As long as that baseline is met, I want the format to take as few bytes per song as possible.
Does that make me not "people?"
People buy from iTunes because they have iTunes software and because it can be faster and easier than hunting down a CD in a store or on Amazon.com--especially if all you want is one song, and you're not sure what album it's from. It's all for convenience.
There is still a distribution chain with iTunes. iTunes does not sign artists (yet), and it is not run by any labels. Therefore, it is distributing music from various labels, both major & indie. And the labels are themselves distribution mechanisms. We're not talking about music directly off some musician's webpage, unfortunately.
The major labels take a percentage of the price of an album or single. If they gouge at $0.99 and they gouge at $1.29, then they will gouge at $0.25. The less you pay at list, the less the artist will get paid. So we've a tricky economic problem here until someone stops the labels from gouging artists.
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney
No. People are just confused as to what the product is.
If I buy a CD, I own the CD. The actual CD. I can shred it, I can give it a friend (so long as I don't have any copies of it), I can sell it, etc. The same would apply to a downloaded song, though it is a bit of a harder stretch for some peoples' minds because of the difference between digital and physical goods.
In neither case did I buy the copyright. I don't control (re)distribution except of my own copy of the work, but I can transfer ownership so long as it is transfered in full.
To clarify, analogue music is also lossy-compressed, since the amount of bandwidth available for storing it is finite. The only way to get uncompressed music is to listen to it live (and not at a big concert where you're really hearing music through the speakers, rather than from the instruments). Unfortunately, it's a bit difficult to fit many musicians in an iPod.
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You a fucking idiot for trolling somebody you don't even know who was just saying what is a fact. The game is rigged you idiot and freedom is just an illusion to make you feel better about yourself. You are not even arguing any of the point he made. Grow up Here's how you work, you too are a cowardly geek who proberbly in his 30's who still gets beaten up by high school kids and you are bitter an angry so you pick a random on slashdot and troll him/her for no reason so you can sound like a hard cunt and feel better about youself till you close the web browser and replace the underwear after getting a wedgie by a couple of 13 year old who made you cry at the video game arcade. Now THAT is how you sound like, get a life
Make SELinux enforcing again!
I agree the AC reply was a bit harsh, but despite that I have to agree with the general sentiment, if not the specifics. It's become a typical /. cliche to rant against anything with the slightest hint of restriction attached. However, you don't agree to a license when you buy a book, or a CD, or a movie. You really, honest-to-god own that copy. Copyright law, which is not a license, no matter what people on /. may really want to believe, says you aren't allowed to make copies (except for some very specific instances). So yes, if you purchased a song you'd own that copy of the song. You'd be free to sell it to whomever you want at whatever price you could get, you just wouldn't be able to (legally) keep a copy for yourself once you've sold it.
Obvious exits are NORTH, SOUTH, and DENNIS.