Good news yesterday, when Steve Jobs wrote that he, too, was no longer in favor of infecting iTunes music with DRM, and called for the major labels to allow Apple to sell music clean and clear. Sure, it’s a bit late, but better than never, I guess.
I’ve only bought, like, 2 songs from the iTunes store, ever. 99 cents a song, while still higher than I’d prefer (because I still remember the brief, but heady days of not-yet-technically-illegal Napster, combined with college dorm net connections =D) — it’s not such a high price to pay, 99 cents – until you find out that you’re restricted in how you can play what’s now putatively *your* song. You can only play your crippled .m4p file on an iPod. And only on a couple of iPods. And you can only play it on a few computers, for which you have to “activate” permission to play that file.
Let’s not forget that CDs are almost never sold infected with DRM anymore, because it’s become pretty apparent that DRM does absolutely nothing to stop what the RIAA thought it would stop; the only thing DRM has actually, measurably accomplished is harassing real customers and screwing up their computers (you might remember how the whole BMG rootkit thing kind of sealed the deal, thank goodness).
After all, not only does DRM implicitly accuse (and convict) the people least likely to be guilty of criminal activity (after all, they’re the ones who freaking paid money!), it also rips them off with crippled, lower-quality versions of the tunes they’ve “bought.” Meanwhile, DRM does nothing to thwart the real outlaws, since those people are pretty good at stealing stuff, no matter what the encoding scheme. And people who Kazaa/Bittorrent stuff aren’t going to get the DRM’d versions the legimiate users are stuck with; no, the file-sharers get to download clean, DRM-free stuff from the pirates. Which means that the people breaking the law are getting better served than the people who are obeying it.
So, duh. And finally, Mr. Jobs gets it. And, eventually, the labels will get it too. Hopefully. Well, if they don’t, they’ll be out of the picture anyway, while the real innovators flourish.
On that note, I’ve been trying emusic for the last week or so. I’m still in the trial period, so I get to download 50 free mp3s from a lot of artists, from classical to experimental (though actually, I still feel weird about getting mp3s of classical music…I’d still rather buy CDs for that). What makes emusic much better than iTunes is that emusic gives you mp3s, meaning the files are entirely sans copy-protection, meaning that I actually *own* the music I buy. So while they’re not ultimately free in the ‘beer’ sense (since I’ll be subscribing when my trial ends, at $9.99 for 30 song downloads a month – I do get to keep the 50 free ones though!), they’re free in the sense that I can do what I want with the music I’ve legitimately paid for.
A couple of shortcomings about emusic: I’d love to be able to stream a whole song before buying it; 30-second snippets just aren’t enough for me. And it’s hard to tell what quality of mp3 you’ll be downloading — it’s variable bitrate, but not lossless. Then again, I don’t have much hard drive space, and also, I’m deaf, and really anything above 128kbps sounds perfectly fine to me, so I don’t really care.
But I am enjoying being able to download an entire Sufjan Stevens album or just one song from an odd band, and having more of a choice in artists than before. The way I’ve been getting music for the past 5 years or so has been through free mp3 sites like Fingertips and 3hive. Those sites aren’t bad, not by a longshot, but they are a lot more random, and it’s more difficult to find a wide selection of music you think you’d like, much less obtain entire albums by artists you want (though that has happened more than once).
There are a few other sites, like magnatune, that (purportedly) do even better when it comes to pricing their music fairly and compensating the artists likewise, but I happen to like the selection offered by emusic, so I’m gonna try it for at least a month or two. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve shelled out real dollars for songs, but I feel like we should encourage the models that roll with the times, in a nice, capitalist-loving way, and emusic is a small step in the right direction.
