Finally. I guess I can start using iTunes to buy music now – I didn’t until now because I don’t buy tracks that tie me to a particular piece of hardware or restrict the number of devices I can play a song on. After all, I have a few computers around the house and mobile devices as well. So far, I’ve mainly bought the good old CDs (I actually also like having the booklet with all the lyrics) and then ripped them to MP3. Occasionally, I’ve used Amazon UK to buy MP3 tracks, which I may continue to do even now, if the price is right. But since I manage my song library in iTunes anyway, if the price is the same, I may as well now buy iTunes Plus songs without DRM. They can even be converted to MP3 at the click of a button.
This is all coming waaaay later than I would have expected, but at least it is finally happening. I have been critical of DRM for years and at least in the music sector, we now finally seem to get rid of it. That of course doesn’t help people who already bought songs on iTunes before – Apple charge a hefty 30 Cents per song to “upgrade” them to a non-DRM format. Which is probably all going to the labels, who seem to have found a great way to charge twice for music people have already bought. Techcrunch even calls it a “$1.8 Billion music tax”, which is not all that far from the truth.
Unfortunately, now that it has taken the music industry a decade to come to its senses, it’s safe to assume that it will take the rest of the media industry another 5 years at least until they also finally come to the conclusion that DRM is a failed concept that will not help them sell more copies of their digital goods. But I’m convinced that it will happen eventually. Until then, the only thing we can do is give as much support to the small niche-providers of DRM-free media as possible. And keep complaining… and breaking DRM schemes to prove that any media that can still be played back can and will be broken (just to clarify: I do not support piracy, but I do support the right of the individual who purchased a movie to format shift and play it on whichever device they choose).
January 7th, 2009
I always read how quickly email addresses published on websites receive spam, but I never actually tried. Well, here’s one that’s been set up for that purpose only: gryawebsf@fablemail.com – see, I even made it a mailto: link for the spammers’ convenience. Now I will monitor the address and once the spam starts coming in, I’ll tell you how long it took. It’s also a nice way to test the spam detection engine I’m using on an experimental mailserver I set up.
Update: Finally… it took longer than expected, but today (Jan. 7th) at 1:29pm I finally got my first spam email. Well actually it was caught by the spam filter, but it was the first time the address was used.
December 17th, 2008
Wow, I seriously need to keep the blog (and my other blogs) updated more often. Actually, I’m thinking of reserving certain times each week for exactly that… looks like it won’t work any other way.
Anyway, here’s a bit of an update that should cover most of the year. First of all, the big news of course is that Heidi and I got engaged in July. It was actually with one foot in each half of the earth, on the prime meridian in Greenwich, London (yes, where GMT comes from). Yesterday we went to the public registry office in my (now: our) home town and registered to get married on June 4th, 2009 – the church wedding, which we think of as more important, is on June 6th.
Heidi moved to Solingen in October, she has a little appartment just 10 minutes walking distance from my place. We share an office already, since we just finished refurbishing my living room/office and there were so many mixups with her phone company that she didn’t have a phone and internet connection for weeks. Now we have decided that this arrangement works so well for us that there is no reason why we shouldn’t continue to work this way.
Job-wise, my job description has changed a bit again. I’m now an “International IT Analyst”, whatever that means. Right now I’m involved in defining IT strategy for the next years, walking the fine line between giving our country offices as much independence as needed and centralizing as many services as possible. It’s a challenge… especially with very little money and even fewer people to tackle the task. But it’s fun and we do get things done, that’s a great encouragement.
I think that’s all for now – as I said earlier, I need to set time aside to do my blogging and that will happen soon. So expect new articles here and on my other blogs pretty soon and more regular updates as well.
December 10th, 2008
Well, I have yet to update this site again, but I thought I’d point out that I started another new site a couple of days ago. If you’re interested in mobile devices, especially those based on the upcoming Android platform by the Open Handset Alliance, head over to android-devices.org and have a look. Maybe leave a comment, too… 
July 7th, 2008
It all began with EMI. Well, not really, there were quite a number of Indie labels that tried it successfully before them, but they were the first major label to allow DRM-free downloadable music. Of course they first did it with iTunes, which is a bit like opening a vault within another vault that remains locked, but in the last couple of months, things have really started moving.
At the time EMI started experimenting with DRM-free downloads, many music industry executives were still thinking of such a move as suicidal. It seems they have pretty much all come around by now. Amazon now has (at least in the U.S.) a huge selection of music in MP3 format and they are planning on expanding that to other countries later this year, which means I will finally get to download all that music that so far I had to buy on CDs and rip.
So what happened? Did the music industry cave in to consumer pressure? Did they finally realize that DRM isn’t going to help them in the long run? One might be tempted to think so, but I think the truth is that they have started to see DRM-free music as a business opportunity. iTunes Music Store was in a position to pretty much dictate how much the music industry could charge for a download and they “stubbornly” refused to sell music for more than 99 Cents. But the industry wanted tiered pricing. The only way to make that possible was to provide an alternative that would still play on the majority of devices – and Apple’s iPod is the market’s leading portable music player, but it only supports Apple’s DRM, which they won’t license to third party music stores. But of course it plays DRM-free MP3 files. So in order to enable other downloadable music stores and break Apple’s quasi-monopoly in the downloadable-music market, the music industry had to bite the bullet and do away with DRM. They didn’t like it (although they may start to notice that it’s not hurting them the way they feared it would), but once the first two major labels had started, there really was no turning back. And you can see that it’s working the way the music industry wants by looking at the pricing at Amazon – there it is, the tiered pricing model the music industry wanted, where they can charge more for their “top tracks” and less for old archive material. It’s not a generous move by the music industry and they were thinking more of themselves than of the consumers – but still we benefit from it and have no reason to complain.
In the long run, the price for downloadable music may go down towards zero – advertising based business models are starting to emerge already. The music industry certainly can’t sit back and relax just yet – actually, their time may be over pretty soon, as the internet enables artists to take distribution into their own hands and already even some major artists have opted for non-traditional ways of distribution. If they go out of business, they will have to blame themselves – for too long they tried to keep up a way of doing business that was contrary to what customers were expecting. You can’t treat your customers that way for very long or they will find the solutions they were looking for from somebody else. If the music industry hadn’t focused on “going to war” with their customers instead of producing the solutions they were looking for, the situation would look very differently today.
Technorati : Amazon, Apple, DRM, EMI, digital music, iTunes, major labels, music industry
February 8th, 2008
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