| Saturday, May 3, 2003 |
11:18 - That sick sinking feeling
http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,58706,00.html
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Wired reports that the stuff we've been hearing about the iTunes Music Store's wild out-of-the-gate success is not exaggerated; if anything, it's too modest.
"We've been hearing amazing numbers," said Jeremy Welt, head of new media at Maverick Records, which is partly owned by Madonna and is home to several big artists, including Alanis Morissette, the Deftones and Michelle Branch.
Welt declined to specify the numbers he'd heard, but said after just two days, sales from iTunes dwarfed Maverick's other online distribution deals, which include Pressplay and MusicNet.
"It's much bigger than anything else we're doing," he said.
Like most of those contacted for this story, Welt was absolutely giddy about the new store. Seduced by how easy it is to use and the fun of exploring music he hadn't heard, Welt said he'd already bought several tracks, despite being able to get most music for free from his industry contacts.
However, Wired has to scrape up a negative angle-- otherwise they risk looking like unbalanced reporters with news that their subscribers might find unpleasant. So, on with the FUD:
Matt Graves, a spokesman for Listen.com, a rival subscription-based service, noted that the licenses Apple has signed with the big-five record labels aren't exclusive. Listen.com and some of the other subscription-based services already offer for download the same catalog of music as the iTunes store, Graves said. (However, subscribers typically pay an additional charge for songs that can be burned to CD.)
In addition, Listen.com provides access to a much wider range of music than the iTunes store, Graves said. Although a lot of that content can be heard as streams only, the service is better for someone exploring music than the free, 30-second clips at Apple's store, he said.
"(Apple's store) is an evolution, not a revolution," Graves said. "We don't see it as super-competitive to what we have."
Apple's digital-rights management system, designed to prevent downloaded songs from being shared wholesale across networks, has drawn fire.
Fred Von Lohmann, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said although Apple's system is less restrictive than most -- it allows sharing across three authorized Macs, and more or less unlimited sharing among CDs and iPods -- like all DRM systems, it will inevitably annoy some users.
"DRM systems are all the same," he said. "They're restrictive. Some people will run into some odd situation not thought of by the designers. They will be very annoyed and turn to a P2P system like Kazaa."
ITunes customers must pre-authorize their machines before they can share songs across three systems, and reports of complaints about the authorization process are already appearing on website forums.
In addition, Von Lohmann said DRM mechanisms are meaningless in the world of file-sharing networks, where most songs are ripped from unprotected CDs. When so many songs are available for free, he questions why Apple and others risk alienating paying customers with DRM restrictions. "It's like locking the back door while the front door is wide open," he said.
Got that? Apple's DRM is too restrictive. Unlimited burning of individual songs, ten burns of unaltered playlists, and free playback on three machines-- including automatic streaming across networks-- and people are going to shun it and go back to trusty ol' KaZaA because the DRM is too restrictive.
Any day now! Just watch! The shunning will begin... now! ...Uh... okay, now! Wait-- stop downloading! Stop! C'mon! Be pissed off with us! Go back to renting music for a monthly fee! Waait! Fellaaaas?!
Oh, and don't forget this bit: <cue Darth Vader Music> ITunes customers must pre-authorize their machines before they can share songs across three systems. Uh... guys? Here's how onerous it is to "pre-authorize" a machine for music downloaded through a given account:
1) Copy the music to that computer;
2) double-click on the song file;
3) type in your password, once.
That's it. Forever. I'm not sure how that qualifies as "pre-authorization", but I'm having trouble seeing an avalanche of criticism arising from how convoluted this process is. Hey, Weird-- if it isn't too much trouble, you might try using the service before panning it, hmm? Thank you.
But other complaints seem to stem from the fact that the service is too expensive-- Wired's angle is that the complaints are all coming from Windows users sniffing that you have to be rich (e.g. own a Mac) in order to use the service. (Thus far.) And LGF's commenters seem united in the "99 cents per track is outrageous!" opinion bloc. Y'know, this comes as rather a surprise to me-- how exactly is a dollar a track an unfair price? After Apple takes its 35 cents, the labels their probably sixty or so-- what's the artist left with? Is this deal an unexpected honeypot for the artists, or the labels, or Apple, or what? Considering that the price is lower than CDs no matter how you slice it, who exactly is getting ripped off here?
I especially like this comment:
One of the very few nice things about France, is that here, copying music is legal.
Heh. Any port in a storm, eh?
Something tells me this party's only just getting started. And I suspect a number of CEOs of music-rental services are digging for their heart pills.
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