Hilary Rosen, formerly head of the RIAA, has a most hilarious column on the new Huffington Post. I double checked the date on the post, and it isn’t April Fools. Miss Rosen is complaining that she can’t buy music for her iPod that doesn’t come from iTunes (Steve Jobs, Let my Music Go):
I spent 17 years in the music business the last several of which were all about pushing and prodding the painful development of legitimate on-line music. Now, the music fan is on the cusp of riches in their options – free of the viruses of the pirate sites. There are lots of places you can go for great music at good deals and with a deep catalog of songs from over the last 20 or 30 years. MSN.com, Rhapsody.com, aolmusic.com, even walmart.com. There are little players to make your favorite music even more portable than ever starting at as little as 29 bucks. Most every player device works at every one of these “stores” and it is pretty easy to keep all the songs, no matter where you got them, in a single folder or “jukebox” on your computer.
Hello? This was and is an obvious consequence of your DRM-ed world, Miss Rosen. Apple is simply doing what comes natural. Having insisted on the means for exclusion being legally protected (i.e. DMCA), Apple is using those means to exclude competitors. The only reason that the other companies mentioned aren’t doing the same thing is because they are struggling to gain marketshare. Were they the dominant players in the market, they would be doing the same thing as Apple.
The problem is that the iPod only works with either songs that you buy from the on-line Apple iTunes store or songs that you rip from your own CD’s.
Well, only if you ignore the many smaller companies that sell unencumbered MP3s to their customers.
But those other music sites have lots of music that you can’t get at the iTunes store.
And they haven’t licensed to Apple, why? Whose fault is that? Is it Apple’s? Or is it the fault of your former clients?
If you are really a geek, you can figure out how to strip the songs you might have bought from another on-line store of all identifying information so that they will go into the iPod. But then you have also degraded the sound quality. How cruel.
Cruel? Miss Rosen is one of the main people who insisted on creating the environment for this cruelty. In any case, if you know what you’re doing, you don’t have to lose much in the way of sound quality … unless the systems are designed to make such stripping of information result in poor sound quality. Then, of course, you could always strip the DRM, but that would be a crime, thanks in part to Miss Rosen.
But keeping the iTunes system a proprietary technology to prevent anyone from using multiple (read Microsoft) music systems is the most anti-consumer and user unfriendly thing any god can do. Is this the same Jobs that railed for years about the Microsoft monopoly? Is taking a page out of their playbook the only way to have a successful business? If he isn’t careful Bill Gates might just Betamax him while the crowds cheer him on. Come on Steve – open it up.
Is it the only way to run a successful business? No, but it is a very good way to run one. Jobs isn’t going to open up his system until it makes business sense. Unfortunately, Miss Rosen hasn’t provided a single argument as to why it makes good business sense for him to do so. Is DRM anti-consumer and user unfriendly? Heck, yes. But that didn’t stop Miss Rosen for lobbying on its behalf.
Why am I complaining about this? Why isn’t everyone?
Many of us have been complaining for a long, long time. Of course, our voices may have been drowned out to a certain extent by all the propaganda emanating from the RIAA that music without the encumbrances of DRM is tantamount to piracy.
You can’t have it both ways Miss Rosen. If you want DRM, someone is going to have to control that DRM. And if you don’t think they won’t use that control to their ultimate advantage, you obviously didn’t learn anything from your association with the music industry.