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.

[Anonymous Coward]

Bono is an expert on media formats in the same way that Dr Dre is an expert on frequency response.

Re:Expert.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, the thing is, in order for something to be pirated, at least one person has to buy it. So he may actually be on to something here....

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.

[brainnolo]

Or to release it under public domain.

Re:Expert.

[Beat The Odds]

I don't know for sure, but since this albums took 5 years to produce...maybe 4 years was CS education.

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

[Karlt1]

Why would Apple -- go back to pushing the full album when they pushed for single song downloads over a decade ago or why would they push for DRM when they encouraged the music industry to get rid of it.

(And before anyone says they were forced to get rid of DRM by the competition, check when Jobs published "Thoughts on Music" and when the other stores started selling DRM free music.)

Re:confused

[Charliemopps]

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

Both are disconnected from real life. You get that rich and you start believing your own marketing teams blather. There seems to be this idea that "Real" musicans are hurt by piracy. It's not even remotely true... most real musicians can't get a record deal or a show because Bands like U2 have the industry locked up. They are part of huge machine that produced devices that could play their music for them (CDs) then locked that format up in such a way that no regular musician could ever afford to produce one. The one album I was involved in back in the 90s cost $20,000 to finish. We got 600 copies and sold them all making a little over $6k back. That market only worked for huge bands like U2. And local bars don't have live music anymore because local bands aren't allowed on the radio. Bands like U2 pay to have their music played, which gets the public accustom to those songs even if they would have like the local bands better... So now the bars playing a CD they had to pay for AND pay royalties back to the RIAA. Often the live band would have played for FREE! But still can't get a gig.

Now... granted, my Band at the time was DeathMetal. So yea, our lack of gigs had a lot to do with our choice of styles. But this is true of pretty much all live music. I've been in dozens of bands since, from Blues to Bluegrass. It doesn't matter. It's a club and the doors are closed. But, unfortunately for them, they've made it far too easy to consume their product. Now people don't even want to pay for it!

The real solution? You can't pirate a live show. Go do some gigs U2.

Re:confused

[macromorgan]

Once Amazon started selling MP3s, I jumped ship from iTunes and never looked back. I imagine even if there was no court order mandating they remove DRM they would have for competitive reasons anyway. Apple may have market power, but not enough to kill the MP3 format I reckon, and it is support for this format that made for a time music purchased from Amazon far better for the iPod than music purchased from iTunes from a consumer standpoint.

Re:confused

[gnasher719]

Once Amazon started selling MP3s, I jumped ship from iTunes and never looked back. I imagine even if there was no court order mandating they remove DRM they would have for competitive reasons anyway.

That's what you call rewriting history. The only reason why there was ever DRM on the iTunes store was because the record labels demanded it. The only reason why Amazon was allowed to sell DRM-free music in mp3 format was because they record labels wanted a strong alternative to the iTunes store - I wonder how happy they are with this nowadays and when Amazon will turn on them like they are turning on the book publishers. At the same time Apple was still not allowed to sell DRM free; only after Apple agreed to raise all the prices.

Just a reminder: The two A's in AAC stand for "Advanced Audio" and have nothing to do with Apple. And AAC = mp4.

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.

Cross between a music album and a video game

[QuietLagoon]

It appears that U2 and Apple are proposing an interactive album format that combines the music of a record album with the interactivity of a video game.

.
Or to phrase it differently, it appears that U2 and Apple are proposing to make music more prominent in video games.

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?

Re:Non-piratable

[organgtool]

It's music that can't be heard and Apple figured U2 would be the perfect band to use this new technology.

Is Apple going downhill?

[aaaaaaargh!]

I have nothing personal against Apple or U2, but if Cook thinks he can keep Apple's overall positive image as a "cool company" (not to speak of rejuvenating it) by collaborating with a pop band whose peak of success was in the late 80s/early 90s, then I can only conclude that Apple has a rough future ahead.

Perhaps I am missing the grand picture here but it's hard for me to imagine anything less innovative and more boring than this U2 bullshit in combination with a wrist watch that looses power after one day.

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.

Re:Legacy Compatiblity

[Technician]

Thsi point is the ignored deal breaker that has killed all other formats that attempted this. If it won't play on any of the following, it's sales are already in decline.

Common MP3 Players
DVD players that play MP3 CD's
Computers Windows, Linux, Apple
Cell phones Android as well as Apple.

Only formats with compatability at a reasonable price will sell in volume.
Unique formats that require a specialised player will have very limited market penetration.

Do I need to list failed formats?
Sony Minidisc with serial copy protection
Microsoft Zune and protected WMA formats
Apple Itunes copy protected format

The Apple format had a reasonable market penetration because they were the first to market with a legal format, but had to drop the protection when other players entered the market at lower prices in more universally playable formats. Apple tried to market the unprotected verson at a higher price, but that was short lived too.

My questions are who is going to produce the compatible players that people will actually buy? Will the player play legacy formats that are not protected? This is important as a new player that won't play existing libraries won't sell much. Will the player import the legacy formats into a protected format? If so, this will cause a backup and archival issue. Will it be compatible with MOST in car infotainment systems?

Many cars have the ability to "Play" MP3's on a USB Thumb drive. How are you going to sell into this market?

Another incompatable format has a high barrier to market entry. Good luck.