DRM and copyright
Comes with music. And stupidly large bills
Is Nokia’s Comes With Music deal one of the dumbest digital music deals ever struck? Could be!
The deal, which enables the phone firm to give users unlimited music downloads, could cost Nokia a fortune.
The Register has learned that Nokia must pay the wholesale per-unit rate for downloads over a certain ceiling - believed to be 35 songs per user.
DRM “still shit” shocker
I wrote this in a PC Plus feature back in 2004:
It’s been a long day, and you deserve a treat. Maybe that reissue of the Jeff Buckley album, or the new U2 one. You make a detour on the way home to stop at the record shop, but it’s boarded up - it looks like it’s gone bust. Damn, you think. That’s a shame; still, there’s plenty of CDs at home. You grab a bite to eat and pull out a few CDs, but when you play them, something strange happens. OK Computer, Exile on Main Street, London Calling… all silent. It soon becomes apparent that every single CD you’ve bought from the local record shop has stopped working. You’ve still got some CDs from other shops, but they don’t work on your stereo and you can’t be bothered getting the HMV-compatible hi-fi from the attic, or the Tower-compatible one from the study.
MSN Music subscribers have just received this message:
As of August 31, 2008, we will no longer be able to support the retrieval of license keys for the songs you purchased from MSN Music or the authorization of additional computers. You will need to obtain a license key for each of your songs downloaded from MSN Music on any new computer, and you must do so before August 31, 2008. If you attempt to transfer your songs to additional computers after August 31, 2008, those songs will not successfully play.
Yet more proof that DRM stands for “bastardy bastardy bastards”.
DVD Jon strikes again
Fed up with DRM and file format compatibility hassles? The entertainment industry’s favourite chap, DVD Jon, may have the answer: DoubleTwist.
As CNet reports, DoubleTwist is “a free desktop client that essentially allows any kind of music, photo, or video file to be shared between a long list of portable media players, and through Web-based social networks.”
The idea, according to DoubleTwist founder and CEO Monique Farantzos, is that media files should be more like e-mail. It shouldn’t matter what service you create the file in, or on what type of hardware, it all should work together seamlessly, she says.
The PC version is available now, and a Mac version’s in development.
Government listens to turkeys, bans Christmas
Rather than go over the insane anti-file sharing plan the government apparently intends to implement, here’s an extract from this month’s The Word magazine talking about EMI.
The average salary across EMI is estimated at £57,328, heavily weighted towards the top. A FTSE 100 company on average has fewer than 20 execs on £500K-plus; EMI is reported to have over 50. These top execs are the ones sitting on top of massive severance packages too…
While all labels rely on that 10 per cent of signings who are multi-platinum successes in every key territory, EMI has (Norah Jones excepted) not signed and nurtured one this side of the millennium…
EMI ignored the warnings of the last ten years to its detriment. The same accusation can be levelled at all the majors. For the first time, a format (MP3) and a delivery channel (online) were developed outside of the labels’ control; their inability to understand the opportunities and possibilities were pre-Luddite.
So obviously, the solution is to cripple the internet industry. Sheesh.
Music biz to Apple: thanks for saving our necks. Screw you! And come to think of it, screw music fans too!
I’m hoping that part of Steve Jobs’ keynote on Tuesday will be the news that all iTunes music is going to become DRM-free, but I’m not holding my breath. The big four major labels have all made Damascene conversions to the cause of unprotected music downloads, but they want to sell them through Amazon, not Apple.
The official reason for this is that the majors are worried about Apple’s dominance of digital music. But the real reason is that they want you to pay more for your downloads.
To understand this, we need a quick bit of time travel. In the bad old days - a few years ago - there were loads of digital download shops, and they were all shite. It wasn’t that the music didn’t work on iPods, although that was a pain. It was that the rights you got for your cash varied from label to label, artist to artist, track to track. Some downloads could be burned to CD. Most couldn’t. Some downloads could be transferred to your portable player (provided it was a Windows Media one). Most couldn’t. Actually working out what rights each individual download came with took longer than it had taken the artists to learn their instruments, write the songs and get them recorded.
It was a bloody mess, and punters - quite rightly - stayed away in their millions.
Enter Apple and the iTunes music store. Where there was confusion, iTunes offered simplicity. Yes, the tracks were copy protected - the record labels wouldn’t let Apple sell the tracks otherwise - but the protection was consistent, and so were the prices. You knew that a download cost X, could be played on X machines, could be copied to your iPod as many times as you like, and could be burned to CD.
Punters - quite rightly - shopped in their millions.
The difference between iTunes and everybody else was really, really simple. The other download services’ terms were dictated by the record labels, who didn’t give a toss whether the result was confusing or punter-unfriendly. iTunes, on the other hand, was more interested in making things simple for you and I.
It turns out that if you treat music buyers with a modicum of respect, they buy music. Who knew?
So what’s happening now? Apple has been banging the anti-protection drum for a while, and the labels have belatedly come to realise that Steve Jobs’ “thoughts on music” open letter - basically, DRM is shite and alienates legitimate punters - was bang on. But they also reckon that Apple has got too big for its boots, so while they’ve embraced DRM-free downloads they aren’t letting Apple get them.
A bit part of this is trying to knock Apple down a peg and show Steve Jobs who’s boss (which is ironic, as it’s the labels’ insistence on DRM that’s created the iTunes/iPod lock-in that helped make iTunes such a big deal). But more than that, it’s because the labels hate the idea of fixed prices for music. The idea that a new song is 79p and an old song is 79p appalls them, and if Apple is the only game in town then that’s what they’re stuck with. Cut Apple out of the equation, though, and they can start varying pricing.
And ultimately that’s what this is all about. Despite the massively reduced production costs of downloads, despite the massively reduced distribution costs, despite the record contracts that mean artists get a pittance from download sales, despite the Long Tail that means selling lots of old records can mean healthy profits, what the labels really want is to put the price of music back up again.
Hands up anyone who thinks variable pricing means new tracks will stay at the same price while old stuff gets cheaper?
Update, 15/1: the New York Times goes into this in some detail.
Sony BMG drops the DRM and makes everything easy
We’re pleased to announce we are the final major music corporation to release electronic tracks without that pesky DRM! All you have to do is leave your house, go to a selected retail outlet, buy a special card there, go back to your house, scratch off the back of the card to find a code, go to our special MusicPass Web site, enter said code, and download one the 37 titles we have available, from Celine Dion to the Backstreet Boys!
[Via Daring Fireball]
RIAA makes last-minute bid for “dumbass of 2007″ award
Sometimes the RIAA reminds me of an unpopular child who grows up to become a minor official in something bureaucratic: now he’s got a little bit of power to abuse, he can wreak his terrible revenge by being really annoying and petty. The Washington Post reports:
In legal documents in its federal case against Jeffrey Howell, a Scottsdale, Ariz., man who kept a collection of about 2,000 music recordings on his personal computer, the industry maintains that it is illegal for someone who has legally purchased a CD to transfer that music into his computer.
And it is, technically (well, it is in the UK. Is it fair use in the US?). But actually trying to enforce it when piracy is rampant is just dumb.
Mac owners more likely to buy music, wear polo-necks
Interesting press release from the NPD Group: 50% of Mac users pay for downloads compared to just 16% of PC users. They’re also more likely to buy CDs.
While there are demographic differences between Mac and PC owners (anybody got a link to reliable stats on that? I think it’d be fascinating), the most obvious explanation for the big difference in paid-for downloads is that the PC download market is a frustrating, confusing pain in the arse.
Rearranging the DRM on the Titanic
As if DRM wasn’t confusing enough, Microsoft is rebranding PlaysForSure as Certified For Windows Vista.
[Via Engadget]
Blimey, another year’s nearly gone
As ever, magazines are doing their review of the year thing and I feel inspired to follow suit. Rather than a “what a year that was, eh?” thing, though, here’s a quick list of things I’ve really liked or been let down by this year.
Books: Mr Biffo, David Quantick and Charlie Brooker made me laugh so hard I probably damaged internal organs, and judging by the way Mrs Bigmouth has been laughing like a drain “Mommies Who Drink” is a hoot too. As always I read about 200,000 crime novels, of which the latest Ian Rankin was the most reliably entertaining, and I loved Tokyo Year Zero by David Peace. Although by “loved” I really mean “was utterly freaked out by”. Which also applies to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
Music: Obligatory Radiohead joy aside (Reckoner is jaw-dropping), the Robert Plant/Alison Krauss collaboration was wonderful despite my hatred of Robert Plant’s voice and my loathing of music that sounds vaguely country. I bought all the Talk Talk records I’d already bought several times already, rediscovered the joys of The Big Dish, was let down by a rather anodyne Sugababes album (what a great first single, though!), discovered Regina Spector about a decade after everybody else and danced very badly to pretty much everything Timbaland has had a hand in this year.
Springsteen’s Magic was an unexpected old-school delight, Mark Ronson’s version of Valerie is one of the most joyous things I’ve heard for ages, Girls Aloud’s Tangled Up was worth buying for Call The Shots alone, and the reissued Joshua Tree reminded me why I used to really love U2.
Tech: Both Vista and Leopard fell into the “glad I have ‘em, could live without ‘em” category, DRM didn’t quite die - although the signs are encouraging - and I had to eat my words about the iPhone, which I thought would be a pile of crap but which I - rather shame-facedly - love dearly despite the lack of 3G. I was also wrong about the Apple TV, which I was very excited about pre-release: it seems as if Apple lost interest in it by the time it actually came out, and it’s become a technological footnote rather than anything more exciting.
FARK, Flickr and PopJustice remained brilliant, Facebook walks the line between fun and being really, really annoying, Newsgator/NetNewsWire/iPhone Integration is better than sliced bread and Logic Pro is God’s own music software. Of the big stuff, the scariest stuff happened (and will continue to happen) in the world of privacy.
Games: Halo 3, too short. Timeshift, predictable but fun enough. Bioshock, flawed but great. Still sod-all decent stuff for the Wii. Orange Box is great value for money, but Half-Life 2 Episode 2 frequently feels like Space Invaders (the antlions in the tunnels, the striders attacking). And not in a good way. Crackdown was a hoot and is well worth tracking down second-hand on eBay. On the PC I loved the Minerva mods for Half-Life 2, but the much-hyped STALKER bored me to tears when it wasn’t crashing.
A major annoyance for me was the increasing focus on online gaming, which means the single player bit of any console game can be completed in about six hours by an inept gamer like me. That probably translates as three seconds for anybody that’s any good. At 40-odd-quid per game, that’s hardly value for money.
The interesting/depressing thing about gaming this year was its increasing resemblance to the film industry: blockbuster-driven with months and months of hype and overly excited previews, with reviewers being outflanked so their words don’t appear in print or online until a terrible game’s hit the top of the charts. Never mind the quality, just look at the first-week sales. A lot of very bad games made a great deal of money this year.
Also depressing was the repeat of last year’s Wii bundle bastardy, where retailers took advantage of Nintendo’s inability to make enough consoles by forcing desperate punters to buy big bundles of crap. They’re doing it again this year.
On a happier note, Eurogamer’s featuring some excellent games writing and the new Rock, Paper, Shotgun blog has quickly become a favourite bookmark.
Magazines that I don’t write for: EDGE and The Word were ace as ever, although the latter is teetering on the very edge of the abyss where Uncut and Mojo live. Empire seems to have found its mojo again, Q’s better than before - less list-y, with proper writing again - although I’m now old enough not to care about 99% of the music it covers, and Car magazine remains a work of art with superb writing to boot.
What about you, ladies and gentlemen?