Archive for the ‘DRM’
Antitrust and Apple
In December a lawsuit was filed against Apple accusing it of making its iPod into what is known as “crippleware”. This mean that while components in the iPod will play “industry standard” WMA files, Apple’s iPod restricts playback to Apple format AAC files. This is true – iTunes does in fact convert all MP3s to AAC files, and I must agree that I find it a pain in the ass. However, I find it a paint in the ass from the other direction – I’d like the industry to let go of the idea of the WMA file as main stream, as the quality of the songs in WMA usually are just not great. I don’t think that is going to happen, but since I follow all things music and apple news so closely, I’ll be following the lawsuit to see where it heads.
iTunes Plus Price Drop
I’m not sure how I missed this little tidbit. I must have been busier than I thought the last two weeks. It seems that Apple has confirmed the rumor of an iTunes Plus (DRM free music) price drop to 99 cents. That’s excellent news in the battle for affordable, usable music. Even better, they are also adding indie artists and labels to the roster. This is fantastic for people like myself who like a lot of music that is not mainstream enough to be part of the industry “big four”. Good job, Apple!
The RIAA Killed Your Ringtones
RIAA has been a thug-life thrill killa for years now, but this one takes the cake. Do you know why Apple passed up their goal of user generated ring tones? That’s right, the ever evil RIAA made them. I am so sick of having to hear about and deal with the RIAA / MPAA bullshit, aren’t you? They should take a good hard look at digital media trends and get with the times already. Sadly, that probably won’t happen any time soon. Definitely read those two intelligent links on the RIAA and ringtones – you’ll learn something new.
Clearly, the record companies jumped on ringtones as a whole of stack of potential profits that could not be allowed to go without remuneration. Apple makes very little from sales of music in iTunes; the vast majority of revenues are funneled back to the record companies, which then devise how to avoid paying their talent and keep as much as they can.
I’ve ranted and raved about the RIAA so often on so many of my blogs that I feel like I’m repeating myself to write it all over again. Don’t worry, I still believe in fighting the good fight! I just don’t want to bore you with repetition. That said, you can read my previous rants thoughts on the RIAA at the following links:
How Do You Find New Music In An RIAA Thug Age?
Arrrr Ye Mateys, Do Ye Have Stolen Music?
FSF Calling Steve Jobs To Account For His Words.
MPAA Tries On RIAA Steel Toed Boots.
Prince: Marketing Genius And RIAA Defeater.
Bush’s Daughters And RIAA Copyright.
Annoying Future: RIAA Schooled By Judge.
Harvard Encouraged To Stand Up To RIAA.
End Of Boycott RIAA Month, Not End Of Fight.
Score One Digital Radio, Zero RIAA.
Television Melding With Internet.
Now They Are Dragging Out The It’s For The Children Chestnut.
The Reasons Behind The Reason.
OK. I just realized how much I’ve written about this topic. There are about 100 more RIAA posts on my various blogs. 
Just go to any of them and type in RIAA, it seems, and you’ll get a gazillion jillion hits.
Two Recent Mac Purchases I LOVE
I made two recent Mac purchases, and I love them both.
The first recent purchase was Mojotones by VoodooErgonomics. I’ve been using a product called Xingtones. Xingtones has been great, I have no problem with Xingtones, but I have to say Mojotones came along and blew it away. They are both $20, so well within most budgets. They both make excellent sounding ring tones. they are both easy to use, though I have to give Mojotones the edge here for being a little more pleasant to look at and overall a slightly simpler interface.
So if they are both equally good products for creating your own ring tones? What really put Mojotones in first place? Four little words: Full Song Ring Tones. also, it is fully integrated with iTunes. Unless the song is locked by the artist, you can make any song in your iTunes folder into 30 clip on repeat or a full song. I love it! Plus, it is one click action and it works with any phone. Xingtone only works with one phone number at a time.
The other little gem I bought this week is the Griffin iMic. For under $40, I can now transfer all of my vinyl and cassettes to my MacBook. How sweet it is! It is a completely plug and play device. If you find the set up as it comes in the box is too noisy on your records and you don’t want to run them through garage band for clean up, they also sell a $20 grounding cable for your turntable that eliminates the problem. The hissing noise just sounds like an old school record to me, so I don’t need the second cable. I’m having a blast with this. It’s too bad I have to work to afford these toys, otherwise I’d be playing with the thing all weekend.
I’d write more gushing words about the iMic, but I have to go play some more old school punk records now. I’m currently on 7 Seconds. See you on the flip side!
SimplifyMedia Responds
I love it when a CEO or co-founder is involved with their product. In this case, the co-founder of SimplifyMedia, Paul Joyce, responded to my lukewarm response to his software as discussed in this post. Here is what he had to say:
Leslie-
Thank you for the mention and the excellent write-up on the importance of music sharing. My music collection is like yours: more than 2,000 albums on vinyl (no weeding), another 1,000+ cd’s and many iTMS tracks.
The reason I wanted to write is that our software’s memory use on your machine is very unusual. This isn’t something we have seen ourselves, and so far yours is the only report from the field. We would really like to understand what the problem might be. If you have it, someone else most likely will too. Do you know how much memory we ended up using? Less than 50MB while streaming is standard for us.
Also, on iTunes-purchased songs, we do let you stream you own songs to an authorized computer, just like Apple LAN sharing. This is a capability other streaming solutions do not have. Just log in on the remote machine using the same screen name. What we can’t do is strip the DRM out so that, in your example, Cyndy can listen. You can thank the DMCA for that. A great Cory Doctorow article from last year does a nice job of summarizing the many reasons DRM sucks.
Thanks again, and have a great weekend.
Paul Joyce
Co-founder, Simplify Media
I replicated the memory issue with Activity Monitor running this morning so I could provide an exact number. I’m not sure if the problem lies in memory use or in compatibility with other programs, however; here is the data pulled from Activity Monitor from just before the last incident:
%CPU 0.30, #Threads 18, RealMemory 20.62 MB, VirtualMemory 361.80 MB
Programs that were also running at the time of each of the incidents: FireFox, Adium, iTunes, ecto, endo, Thunderbird, Word
I don’t experience this issue with any other combination of programs, and SimplifyMedia is the only new addition to the MacBook lately. I hope that helps you plan for future instances. I appreciated your response to my post. Future users of SimplifyMedia should be confident using your product regardless of issues I’ve experienced, just knowing that the company is paying attention. Regardless, the fact that you can’t play iTunes files due to DRM issues is a real sticking point for me that has nothing to do with SimplifyMedia. I’d be interested to know if anyone has a workaround in the works for this problem that you can use with programs like this one.
How Do You Find New Music In An RIAA Thug Age?
The RIAA seems hell bent on preventing people from finding new music the old fashioned way – by sharing it with friends. I wouldn’t listen to music at all if I had been restricted to what the radio programming manager decided should be the handful of songs in rotation in any given week. My entire life I’ve never been a fan of what’s on the radio. I love punk, goth, alternative (real alternative, not the current umbrella category) and other off the wall choices. Would I have found the music I love in public consumption? Hell, no. I had to turn to my friends for that. They’d make me mixed tapes, and I’d go buy the albums if I liked the songs. I’d say what the RIAA considers illegal music sharing in analog form is what got me to the point where I own (as in paid for, you RIAA fucktards) over 400 cassettes, 800 CDs, nearly 800 records (it was 1000 – I weeded) and tons of iTunes and eMusic mp3s (over 1000 so far and still going). Tally that up, you narrow minded corporate drones – I may be one person, but that is a LOT of money spent on music over the years.
Anyway, RIAA rant aside, we are still left with the problem of how to share the music that we legally own. Playing a song for your friends, no matter where they are, is definitely fair use in my book. Not only that, it is fair use that leads to sales – it’s how we discover new talent. There are a few things you can do to find new music. You can listen to internet radio, assuming the RIAA doesn’t destroy that also in their quest to homogenize the planet and control the airwaves. Internet radio is full of stations that play truly alternative, cutting edge music. Streaming one of the stations, even the ones you see on iTunes radio, is a great way to find something new to love.
You can try programs like SimplifyMedia. My friend Cyndy and I tried this last night, and she wrote a review of it in her Web 2.0 series on Profy. She liked it better than I did. I give it points for catering to the voyeur in me – snooping around someone else’s iTunes and judging them for bonding with them over their taste in music is always fun. Plus you get to see the guilty pleasure songs they never allow to pop up on their iPod and tease them about it (she got to see my Johnny Cash hiding in my playlist, I got to see her show tunes). SimplifyMedia has a couple of major drawback though. First, you can not see the music you bought using iTunes. That is a huge blow against this software for me as I’m a big believer in fair use once I’ve paid for something. Second, while the program doesn’t take up much room on your hard drive, or use much bandwidth, using it really blows up your RAM consumption. I have 1.25 GB in my MacBook, and I found I had to close programs to keep the stream going – not cool.
You can share music the old fashioned way, by burning your friend a CD or emailing them a song. That works for real life friends, but what about interweb fwenz? That puts them completely out of the picture. You can push your luck by using an old fashioned service like Napster used to be, but I wouldn’t recommend that. It puts you at risk for RIAA attention, of course, but also for viruses hidden in files – it just isn’t smart in either case. I believe you should be able to share music that way if you want, again because it drives sales, but this is one case where the risks outweigh the reward. I’d stick to email or CD “mix tapes” instead.
My current favorite way to share music is Mog. This new social network allows you to create a profile and place widgets on both the Mog profile and your web site (you can see my “currently playing” widget in the lower right sidebar). You then make friends, similar to Myspace, Friendster, FaceBook and others but with a much less obnoxious interface. what I love about it that you can blog your music on your Mog profile and upload songs, alum art and videos to support your review of the artist. Then you can embed the player in your blog or web page, giving you another way to point to your review and expose your favorite music to the masses. I’ve done this a couple of times, and know for a fact it resulted in sales – the people who bought the songs would not have heard of them otherwise. It’s easy, they do all of the work for you, and it doesn’t require any software to be installed on your computer. Both Mog and SimplifyMedia work on Macs without a hitch.
However you do it, don’t stop sharing your music tastes with the world just because the greedy people at the RIAA want more of your money (and believe me, it is the RIAA who get the money they sue for, not the artists). I tallied up the total spent on music from my list above and using average costs of cassettes, CDs and records at the tie of purchase, plus iTunes songs, I figured I have spent an average of $26,170 in music since the age of twelve. that’s more than my car costs, people, and yet the RIAA is still being greedy. Shame on them. If you have a favorite way to share music with friends, let me know in the comments. Shoot, if you like the kind of music I do, go ahead and recommend music to me in the comments – I’m always looking for a new earworm.
If you just want to add me to your Mog friends, click here for my Mog profile.
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Technorati Tags: Music Sharing, RIAA, Fair Use, Mix Tape, Music, Online Music Downloads, Streaming Radio, Mog, iTunes, iPod
Amazon Competing With iTunes?
Amazon announced today that it was finally opening its long-rumored DRM free music store. You an look for it to open later this year. With a full catalog of DRM free music and 12000 choices so far, is this a threat to iTunes? Not really. Apple continues to be at the forefront of the DRM free fight with the remaining three record labels (EMI being the only major label who has already signed on with both Amazon and Apple). Steve Jobs continues to use his heavy hitting industry clout to bend the last hold outs to his will, er, make them sign a DRM free agreement for his customers. (more…)
Ticketmaster and iTunes Summer of Free Music
Yes, you read that correctly. Ticketmaster and iTunes are teaming up to give away free music all summer long. Here’s how it works:
Go to Ticketmaster and purchase concert tickets for any summer concert between Memorial Day and Labor Day. You get a free song from iTunes for every ticket you purchase. Also, every person who buys a concert ticket this summer, no matter when they purchase it, will get a 10 song downloadable music sampler showcasing songs form ten artists, for free! That’s a double whammy of free song goodness.
Free music – concert tickets you were going to buy anyway – how can you go wrong? Go! Check it out!
Author: Leslie Poston, © 2007, All Rights Reserved
Apple Continues to Lead the Charge Against DRM
After striking such a successful and well-received deal with EMI for DRM-free music, Apple plans to continue its successful bid against DRM by meeting with the remaining three major record labels. As expected, Sony BMG, Universal and Warner are all upset at the “unfair” deal struck by EMI and Apple. The deal between EMI and Apple embraces the future of digital music delivery, and has little to no resemblance to the bloated cash cow the music industry has been used to. The other three record labels are upset EMI didn’t try for a bigger piece of the music pie, and of Apple’s pie.
“EMI struck a deal that puts all of us at a disadvantage,” said an anonymous music executive. EMI defends its position, saying that consumers were frustrated with DRM protection. “We believe removing it will boost digital music overall,” an EMI spokeswoman said.
It is said that the three remaining major labels will try in typical greedy fashion to push for a share of iPod sales and restrictions on iTunes, among other things. I still hold firm that refusal to let go of old industry standards will continue to hamper the music industry. It is my hope that Apple will stand firm against the price gouging and greed that these companies view as their birthright and force them to change with the times by not giving them the extra money and needless restrictions they seek.
You can read the full article here.
Author: Leslie Poston, © 2007, All Rights Reserved
Apple Gadgets To Go With Your iPod
One of the fun things about Apple are the peripherals companies release to go with their products, especially the iPod line. There are several cool gadgets coming out for the iPod, and a few that have been out that you may not know about yet.
Releasing this week is a keyboard from Razer that has a built in dock for your iPod. It is slated to sell for around $130. The keyboard is to be called the Pro | Type and will be sleek white to match the majority of the Apple line, and will have ten media fast keys for easy navigation and control of your media experience.
[tags]apple ipod ihome ms pac man games nano shuffle gadgets speakers dock keyboard razor[tags]
If you haven’t put games on your iPod yet, you should. They are a ton of fun downloadable for under $5 on iTunes, and give you a portable gaming experience for those times when music isn’t enough to keep you occupied. One such game is the nostalgic Ms Pac Man for the iPod, a true representation of the arcade classic.
iHome has developed a line of affordable iPod-ready radios and other devices. I actually have the iHome under counter kitchen clock radio installed, and I love it. It has great sound for its price range and it was super-easy to install. It fits all iPods, Nanos and Shuffles on the market. Sure, there are plenty of high end iPod intergrated radios and speakers by companies like Bose, but those are out of many people’s price range. iHome gives the average user a chance to increase the usability of their iPod.
Author: Leslie Poston, © 2007, All Rights Reserved
iPod Reaches the 100 Million Mark, Shows No Signs of Stopping
Yesterday Apple reported the sale of its 100 millionth iPod. Today market analysts are predicting a continued upswing in the product’s sales and popularity. Apple isn’t known for tooting its own horn on anniversary dates and milestones, but the 100 million iPod mark got a mention. You can read one of the news articles about the 100 millionth sale here.
In fact, says Phil Leigh, president of market-research firm Inside Digital Media, making DRM-free tracks available at iTunes could actually help Apple by driving more music lovers away from peer-to-peer sites.
That’s why analysts like Leigh think Apple will be able to hold on to its dominant share of the music-player market—and perhaps even see a significant boost to the rest of its business. “This is going to be something more than just the doubling of [Apple’s] market share,†Leigh added. “I think it will go from 5 percent to 20 percent. It will have a much more significant affect than what Microsoft have let themselves believe.â€
So what makes the iPod so incredibly popular? How did it crossover into the coveted arena of the “must have” item? It it most likely due to a combination of things. It was the first product offered by Apple that offered the Apple cachet and Apple look and feel that the “cool” technology users had always known about at a price point many people could afford. It has Apple’s traditional intuitive design. It has iTunes, which is a solid music and video purchasing interface in spite Apple’s initial reliance on DRM. The fact that Apple is now discarding DRM only makes the iPod / iTunes combo more appealing than ever before. iPod was, in short, the right gadget at the right time marketed to the right demographic.
Apple’s drive to constantly improve and innovate, striving to be on the cutting edge in all of its markets, will hep increase iPod sales as time goes. Their commitment to DRM free music, beginning with the recent EMI deal, will draw in even more customers. They are dealing with the potential issue of DRM free music opening them up to mp3 player competition by increasing the quality and bit rate of the DRM free music files you purchase form them. They continue to bring their A-game in a world that has been faced with substandard, “disposable” technology for too long. Their commitment to quality will continue to push them forward, especially if they continue to keep their customer service rating at the level of excellence they currently have.
Author: Leslie Poston, © 2007, All Rights Reserved
FSF Calling Steve Jobs To Account For His Words
FSF (the Free Software Foundation) has been focusing on Apple and Apple products for a while now, even going so far as to picket Apple Stores both here and in Europe. They promote the use of fully DRM free file downloads and other free use software. In the aftermath of Steve Jobs’ white paper “Thoughts On Music” on ending DRM they have called on him to put his money where his mouth is.
FSF has started an internet petition for the complete end of DRM at Apple. In the petition they have presented several ideas on how Apple could accomplish this, including better indication of independent artists and immediate DRM-free file downloads from the independents. This would also help music buyers who are participating in the move to Boycott the RIAA choose independent artists who are not affiliated with one of the four major labels, and thus not under the thumb of the RIAAs henchmen. FSF also asks Jobs to use his position of power in the industry to promote DRM-free music everywhere, and also to promote DRM-free movies from Disney Film Studios.
Their petition may be hard to get to – it received over 1000 signatures in the first hour it was posted and has been under fire with heavy bandwidth traffic ever since. If you’d like to read the open letter and sign the petition, it is here.
Author: Leslie Poston, © 2007, All Rights Reserved
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