iTunes: Where’s the music? MP3s?
This weekend, I fired up iTunes for the first time (on both my Mac and PC). I also made my first purchases from the iTunes Music Store (ITMS).
First thing: I do like iTunes. It’s a nice piece of software with a good interface. Some people have complained about memory usage and performance, but on my 2.4GHz Celeron and 1GHz G4, there doesn’t seem to be a problem. Using iTunes and the ITMS was very easy and painless. Synchronization with the iPod was definitely a lot slicker than it was with MusicMatch.
Regarding the ITMS: Apple talks about having 400,000 tracks by the end of October, from all 5 major labels and over 200 independents. But, it’s very easy to spot gaps in their music. Why are bands not signing up for this? I can understand not finding songs by Queen, because the label needs to make sure that digital delivery rights are cleared with the songs’ publisher. But, why can’t I find Nickelback? You’d think that any platinum band releasing a new album should be on ITMS at this point, but they’re not.
I watched Steve Jobs’ announcement of iTunes for Windows. While trashing Windows Media Player, he said “we’ve heard over and over from customers that what they want is to be able to create MP3 files”. Let me state for the record that what I want to buy are MP3 files as well.
ITMS has the least restrictive DRM out there, which I’m happy about. But, if I’m looking to buy a whole album, I’ll buy the CD. With a CD, I can rip good quality MP3s with no DRM hassles at all. The main reason that I’ll use ITMS at this point is that it is the only inexpensive way to buy single songs that is not crippling to use.
Note to the music, movie, software, book (and any other media) companies: copy protection sucks. Provide a good product at a reasonable price and you won’t need it. The software business went through this cycle and unanimously came to this conclusion.
Unanomously came to that decision? On which planet?
Nealy every game you buy has copy protection. Windows XP has product activation, and a number of other software products are going down that route. Nearly every shareware program has some form of registration system to prevent copying. And even in this day and age, some specialist software still comes with a dongle …
The number of software products without copy protection is probably smaller than the number with it.
Maybe I should have clarified that I was really talking 10 years ago. I remember how much software came with copy protection during the 80s… and, with the exception of games and specialized software, they all dropped it. Heck, even the original “shareware” programs back in those days weren’t crippled at all.
So, you’re right. It wasn’t unanimous because there were some holdouts. But for a whole big chunk of the software world, copy protection went away. I disagree with the statement that the number of software products with protection outnumbers those without. I’ve bought (on CD and download) quite a few software products that I’ve been able to install and reinstall at will without any hassles. Sure, *trial* versions have some kind of protection, but full versions haven’t generally.
People are trying it again, though. Windows XP’s activation scheme has not been exceedingly popular. Intuit’s activation scheme for Turbo Tax drew so much ire that they had to drop it.
DVD has been a very successful format despite the copy protection because the format works well for what people want to do with it. With storage getting cheaper and denser, though, it’s only a matter of time before people want all of their videos on their home media servers and portable video players… and DVD and CSS will not be quite so attractive then. (Or maybe it will be okay, since CSS is such a weak bit of DRM anyhow.)
It boils down to not annoying the customers. I had a hard drive crash recently and had to reinstall Windows XP on a new machine. I had to call Microsoft to reactivate, and I will say that they made the process as easy as it can be… but it still involved reading like 80 digits into the phone, and then typing in 42 digits that the person on the other end read out to me. Every previous version of Windows would have just reinstalled without issues. Even if the process is easy, it’s not a benefit to me and any inconvenience they put me through is one step toward a competitor.
(In fact, I’m entering this on my Mac, and my laptop at my previous job was running Red Hat.)