Flummoxed, to say the least…
Bob goes on a fantastic rant about iTunes Plus, Apple’s recently released “DRM-free” music download store, over at Lefsetz Letter. I suggest passing on this post if the f-word upsets you.
When I go to buy a car, they don’t say if I want to LOOK at the one loaded up with options I can no longer look at the base model. Unless I remember that there are multiple levels and I go into the manager’s office and sign a waiver. And then I can’t look at the EXPENSIVE version unless I go back into the office!
And since you can only see one or the other, how many people are gonna no longer know that a cheap version is available?
Utter fucking bullshit.
Whom do I blame? Eric Nicoli or Steve Jobs?
Give us the option, cheap or expensive. That’s the American way, comparison shopping.
But not in music. The going out of business labels are CONTINUING to fuck their customers.
And then it continues with…
In case you’ve been out of the Net loop, when you buy an UNRESTRICTED track at the iTunes Store, it comes with your NAME and E-MAIL address EMBEDDED!
Why is it these fucks think we won’t catch on, that we’re ignorant and won’t spread the word how fucked up they are. Don’t they understand this is how they got in trouble in the FIRST PLACE? The INTERNET!
Just like Lindsay Lohan can’t cover up the fact that she crashed her car high on coke, Apple and EMI can’t cover up the fact that they’re fucking with us. This is WORSE than restricted/DRM/copy-protected music!
They’re trying to SCARE US back into the last century. Trying to trip us up, trying to keep us playing on their terms. EMI hasn’t given up on copy protection, they’ve just instituted a NEW ONE! Wherein they can trace your track if you choose to do anything untoward with it. Yup, if it’s your track that’s being traded P2P, you’re FUCKED! You’d better not open your music folder to P2P trading, your NAME might get out!
Yowza. I can understand and appreciate his, erm, disappointment…we’ll see if any answers from Apple or changes to the system happen. In the meantime, I think I’ll pass on iTunes Plus.
This rant makes absolutely no sense! When you take cash from the bank (or ATM), every bill has a serial number. If anything illegal is ever done with that money, it can and will be tracked back to you. If you use your many in a normal way, nothing will ever happen. No government or secret agency will track what you do with that $20 (pay for that Hustler DVD in a XXX store), it will just make its trip until it ends up in some bank again.
These files are your property, once you buy them from iTunes Store. You can always prove this, since they will have your name and e-mail (simply click Ctrl-I when a song is selected in iTunes and you can see it – nothing hidden here!). This is nothing new – since iTunes started selling songs years ago, the name and address was added to every file.
If you lose your iPod, and someone finds it, rips the songs back into a PC (or Mac) and puts them on P2P, theoretically, if the music labels (currently, only EMI) trawl regularly P2P systems, they may pick up your files there and track you down through Apple (with their assumed cooperation, of course). If you reported your iPod stolen (and, if you had hundreds of purchased songs, you should), police report will put an end to this. This is no different than when somebody steals your credit card number – once you discover it, you report it to your credit card company and you don’t have to pay a dime of unauthorised charges.
There is absolutely nothing sinister here. This is the best possible way to give consumers total freedom to do with their music whatever they want (the original ‘fair-use’ clause); you can make as many copies for your friends, relatives, colleagues, iPods, cellphones (non-Apple, as well as iPhones), burn on as many CDs as you want and no entity in the world would be able to track this UNTIL, and that is only UNTIL – you (or someone you gave the file to) puts YOUR property (i.e. purchased file) onto a P2P service. Even then, if we’re talking only about 10 – 15 songs, they won’t bother. But, if it’s 500 songs, they’ll come knocking. You’d better have you iPod reported stolen then.
Hey Predrag, thanks for stopping by. :-)
The rant I was referring to actually had more than just the layer about your identity being tied to the purchase. First, the incredibly cumbersome way one must maneuver around the iTunes Store to enable/disable iTunes Plus as the default. So, lets say someone gets all excited about mp3s being sold rather than the DRM’d stuff they’ve been avoiding in the past. So they make it their default. I’d like to think that person would realize that by doing so they’ve shrunk the pool of music to choose from significantly…but what if they don’t? They’re now confined to a store of EMI artists only (and yes, there’s lots of them, but there’s lots more that *aren’t* on the roster). Yuck. I’ve got a Mac, love it, don’t know what I did before it – which is why when something Apple produces is so inherently cumbersome, it instantly smells more like it was deliberate than a lack of attention to the user experience.
Second – transparency. We all blindly skim past user agreements and check the ‘accept’ boxes without thinking. Maybe the point itself about the music wouldn’t be so bad, IF it was made abundantly clear to the user that this was the case when they made the purchase. “Look – this is what we have to do to alleviate privacy, it’s a significant step up from the locked down files, give/take, push/pull, can’t we all just get along?” Yeah…then I bet a lot of the skepticism (or in Bob’s case, animal fury) would go away. The big record companies have been panted as evil beasts for a long time now – having an open conversation with the customers that they’re loosing by the second would go a long way to improving this relationship. We may roll our eyes the first time, and probably again the second time, but that’s still a huge improvement from pesky details like my personal information coming up…without being brought to my attention by the folks who are using it.
So, as I said before, iTunes Plus isn’t for me – yet. Maybe down the line…maybe I’ll move an inch and hopefully they’ll nudge their way into a more listener friendly mindset as well. I understand the frustration of the record labels as much as I understand Bob’s. Somewhere in the middle I think there’s a way to build something that meets (or at least respects) the needs of all parties. iTunes Plus doesn’t fit the bill, IMHO.
Hey, Predrag:
I’m afraid YOUR comment (which I saw you copypasted in every blog mentioning the issue) is the one that makes no sense. Basically, because your analogy doesn’t work. No one intends to give away money at random, as far as I know, whereas lots of people are willing to share their songs — which is what the labels don’t want you to do.
In any case, 256 Kbps is unacceptable now that lossless is easy and connections are faster, so who cares.