U2 and Apple Collaborate On 'Non-Piratable, Interactive Format For Music'

Squiff writes U2 and Apple are apparently collaborating on a new, "interactive format for music," due to launch in "about 18 months." (A direct interview is available at Time, but paywalled.) Bono said the new tech "can't be pirated" and will re-imagine the role of album artwork. Marco Arment has some suitably skeptical commentary: "Full albums are as interesting to most people today as magazines. Single songs and single articles killed their respective larger containers. ... This alleged new format will cost a fortune to produce: people have to take the photos, design the interactions, build the animations, and make the deals with Apple. Bono’s talking point about helping smaller bands is ridiculous ... There's nothing Apple or Bono can do to make people care enough about glorified liner notes. People care about music and convenience, period. As for “music that can’t be pirated”, I ask again, what decade is this? That ship has not only sailed long ago, but has circled the world hundreds of times, sunk, been dragged up, turned into a tourist attraction, went out of business, and been gutted and retrofitted as a more profitable oil tanker."

Comments

Expert.

[Anonymous Coward]

" Bono said the new tech "can't be pirated" "

Since when is Bono qualified to have an opinion on this subject?
He should make songs and not talk about things he hasn't got a clue about.

Re:Expert.

[jrumney]

You can't pirate something if it is already forced down everyone's throats.

Re:Expert.

[mikeabbott420]

Arrr matey, it doesn't remain to be seen if the music can be pirated, if an audio track can be heard it can be copied.

Re:Expert.

[afidel]

Um, no, he's much, much less an expert than Dre is. As a respected producer at least Dre has some validity as a good ear, and he can evaluate the results of different parametric curves on tone signature, Bono can claim no such expertise in container formats unless he's gone back and studied CS while the world wasn't watching.

Re:Expert.

[Anonymous Coward]

Whether or not his new digital music format can or cannot be pirated is something that remains to be seen

Can you listen to it with your headphones of choice? If so you can connect line out to the line in of any computer and record a very pirate-able wave file. Any distortion will be insignificant compared to what compression adds to it these days.
Even if they start to send the audio encrypted to the headphones I can still place a high quality microphone in them and record the audio. (Assuming that the output from the headphones isn't crap, but then I don't want to listen to the original either.)

You don't have to wait to see anything. It is not possible to prevent piracy. (Unless you shut down all forms of communication, if people can't communicate with each other they can't spread undesired information.)
Even when it comes to concepts like sending an encrypted video stream to the TV to prevent movie piracy it doesn't work since a single person can just open the TV and grab the video data as it is sent to the LCD. (And as a worst case, point a video camera at the screen.)
There is no point at where the prevention method is good enough to make it impractical to break it.
Computer game companies are way ahead when it comes to copy protection and there we clearly see that it only requires one dedicated person that works through the binary to disable to protection, even server connected software have been proven breakable.
The music and movie copy protections do not require even a fraction of the work compared to that and even then it is still not enough.

Re:Expert.

[LordWabbit2]

Might even sound better than his current music.

Re:Expert.

[brainnolo]

Or to release it under public domain.

confused

[alphatel]

How exactly is this supposed to make the end user feel good about either U2 or Apple?

Re:confused

[Jhon]

Because it shows that neither know what they are talking about. If I can HEAR it, I can copy it. And the quality can get pretty damn good depending on how the sound is captured.

Maybe when they build a gizmo that broadcasts the sound directly in to your brain...

Re:confused

[Matheus]

This comment just ain't quite right. There's gems in there but a whole lotta muck to dig through.

1) Getting a record deal isn't that hard... knowing that you don't actually *want one is the challenge. Todays world means I can create, promote and most importantly distribute my music *without some massive company stealing all of the profits. I might not go multi-platinum without a big marketing engine but I've had no problem at all selling enough albums (tracks actually) to pay for the work.

2) The '90s? Yeah... lets talk about history. In the 90s it was still expensive to produce a CD. Burners were just coming on the scene and were slow and expensive (and a lot of players couldn't play burned discs) so you still needed a big distribution company to produce them. Move to the late 90's into the Naughts and I could produce a saleable CD for pennies but the most important thing is we quickly were moving to the part where the physical CD didn't matter. I could now sell my music digitally with $0 physical production cost beyond the studio. Even the studio is less expensive! Unless you buy some expensive producer studio time / hr has dropped as the digital studio has taken off. Honestly I have all the gear to do it myself (and the ear and tech skill) so my studio cost is down to my time.

3) "Local bars don't have live music anymore." Are you kidding me?! I don't know where you live so I'm really sorry if your hometown has a depressing scene but where I live (and everywhere I travel to which is extensive) there is an exact opposite problem. Every single bar big enough to have a PA-on-a-stick in the corner has live music. The clubs are blowing up even bigger (not even looking at the stadium and big theater scene). Local bands are having trouble making music because on any given night of the week the people who choose to go out have SOOO much to choose from. Minneapolis is my home scene and we're just plan ridiculous on most nights (at least 5/wk if not 7) you have competition in every single major genre (including metal) so a great band is playing for dozens instead of hundreds of people (or the 'great' ones are playing for hundreds and the small ones are playing to the bar staff). You want a gig? I can get you a gig tomorrow. I just can't promise anyone will come to see you play.

4) "You can't pirate a live show": Actually people "pirate" live shows all the time. I'm a recording engineer and technically that's what I'm doing every time I record a show and put it up for free download. The difference is the bands *want me to do that because they understand that the exposure counts more than any $ they may make off that recording.

5) "Play some gigs U2": Um.. you are talking about the band that just played a 110 show *stadium tour spread over 2 years. They just released this album so I imagine we have another one coming. They *spent $1M per day on that tour and were in the red for some large percentage of that making $ only towards the end. Honestly U2 is one of very few bands that could have even pulled off that tour. Even the stadium market is saturated but they had the universal draw to sell out stadiums around the world else they certainly would have lost money on that tour.

So anyway... sorry your band didn't do well but don't blame the industry on that. It happens. A lot.
Back to the original article: Apple and Bono are being stupid... since I boycott Apple already (for other stupid stuff like this) and get my U2 through other channels this really won't affect me aside from reinforcing why I boycott Apple in the first place.

Challenge accepted!

[Anonymous Coward]

don't they realize when they make statements like "can't be pirated", a whole bunch of people reply with "challenge accepted!" and will go to great lengths to do so?

Apple's new streaming service?

[rasmusbr]

The only way to make something unpiratable is to have it be a continuous interaction between a client and a server where you control the server.

I guess this music "format" is essentially going to be Apple's answer to Pandora, Spotify, et al.

Undeletable

[unapersson]

It's a new form of distribution, everyone gets a copy which is undeletable. They make money by charging for a removal tool.

Bono should stick to his day job

[Anonymous Coward]

Or at a minimum he should have a day job.

I'm a U2 fan, I like their music, I saw their last show in Dublin and I was happy to pay handsomely for the pleasure.

But increasingly musicians are looking to become rent seekers. The ought to earn a living like everyone else. Get on the road, Play gigs.

The expectation of a royalties for longer than a lifetime is a symptom entitlement, based solely on 'because we can'. I'm going to rip their music for as long as I can. When I can't, I'll stop going to their shows.

And where does Bono's sense of entitlement come from, he's a fucking northsider.

www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Northsider%20(dublin)

That is always one way

[bobjr94]

If the format is drm locked, in the end, there is always a headphone jack or line out. Sure not a lossless conversion but most people won't notice or care. The older age of U2 fans won't want to be forced to play some dumb game to unlock a new song. They want to plug their phone into their car, press play.

Apple's post-peak celebrity embraces

[swb]

Why does Apple keep investing themselves in post-peak celebrities?

Dre, Iovine and U2 may be influential but how much currency do they have among future music fans? Is it because the decision makers at Apple are all in their late 40s-to-50s and are merely caught up in the fandom of their youth?

Shouldn't they be forming partnerships with artists with a ton of pull with 20-somethings? Do kids in their 20s even listen to U2, or is it something that 40-something moms crank up in their minivans along with an illicit Marlboro Light on their way to pick up the kids at soccer practice?

If U2 had any hip credibility, it was 30 years ago. Can you imagine Apple rolling out the Macintosh in 1984 with a celebrity lineup of the Everly Brothers and Bill Haley & the Comets?

Non-pirateable???

[mark-t]

Unless the format involves directly beaming the experience of hearing the music into human brains, without actually producing any audible sound whatsoever, I'm pretty sure it can be pirated using long existing methods.

The Titanic is UNSINKABLE.

[Weaselmancer]

Ah, hubris! One of my favorite old-timey sins.

You are of course correct. The signal must become analog at some point to make it into your head, and we have had the capability to capture analog signals since the dawn of the television age. You can crack open LCD panels and intercept signals for a more modern high tech version of this concept, of course.

But you are forgetting the other side of the equation. When when someone makes that statement - "THIS CANNOT EVER BE PIRATED" - you are throwing down the gauntlet. And invariably some bored teenager will say "oh really is that so?" and make them eat their words. Usually by the following Saturday. Yes you can do an analog capture but by the time you warm up your soldering gun some kid in the Netherlands will have already got the torrent up.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go watch a Blu-Ray movie on my Linux box.

Re:The Titanic is UNSINKABLE.

[mlts]

Devil's advocate:

Things are different from the 2000s when everyone and his brother, sister, grandmother, and father in law was coming out with an "unhackable" DRM scheme. For one, the market has shifted from PCs/Macs to consoles for gaming. The PS4, Xbox One, and others have not been cracked yet, so piracy and hacking is at 0% on those platforms.

We also didn't depend on user accounts. A background process like VAC or Blizzard's Warden didn't exist that would completely cut off access to services. All it would take is Apple running a similar process that sits in the background and looks for cracking tools, then locks any AppleIDs suspected of doing so. The days of running "unfuck.exe" are long gone, since it would get detected, and all access lost.

Of course, there is video. Yes, there are SD copies and screeners, maybe even someone ballsy enough to cam and slip that on BitTorrent, but 1080i (true, not upsampled) movies are rare. Satellites have not have any real hacks in a decade. Even Apple's movie format has no working cracks with no deprotection utilities out, unless one wants to capture video and re-encode it with the generational quality loss.

Yes, we will see some "cracks", such as saying World of Warcraft is cracked because someone is running a server emulator, but I will be surprised to see available, unprotected works that were protected in this format.

Yes, DRM has been cracked in the past, but it gets harder and harder each cycle. Even Blu-Ray hasn't been fully cracked yet (it is still a race with each individual movie.)

Easy

[ArcadeMan]

Interactive? Music? Apple? That's easy. They're going to make "Music apps" for iPhones and iPads.

But those won't work on the iPod shuffle, the iPod nano and I'm guessing it won't work directly with the future Apple Watch either.

If it's music, I don't want to "interact" with it, I just want to listen to it.