Tag Archive for 'digital rights management'

Ringtones: When DRM Goes Too Far

published
on January 21, 2008
by
ACtual
in music and technology
. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

Digital Rights Management and the relating issues have been big topics recently in both music news and the world of MixMatchers. As a large portion of our group is involved with creating music, the questions as to who owns it and how it can be controlled are always at the top of the conversational trash heap. It’s a sticky situation which I touched on a bit in my previous post “Record Execs: Stupid or Just Plain Greedy?“, and constantly up for debate. It’s also the subject of quite a bit of mud throwing in the higher levels of the music industry as executives try to pass the buck as to who wants DRM, how they want it and where it came from. Furthermore, some of the bigger companies are starting to roll back their DRM in an effort to make more content cross-compatible with multiple hardware solutions (Apple DRM will only play on iTunes and iPod). Steve Jobs has expressed his opinion, and despite having helped create one of the most profitable and highly controlled DRM markets with iTunes and FairPlay, he advocates an end to DRM for music. I find the amusing point here that Jobs probably said one thing about DRM when he was trying to get label executives to let him sell music on iTunes, but has a much more pro-consumer point of view in his open letter.

Unlike a large majority of my peers, I don’t have a problem paying for my music. In my mind, the .99 cents we pay per track now is a much better deal than the 16-18 we used to pay for CDs. Think about it…on an 18 dollar CD, there might be 12 tracks. Of those, you might only like two. But you don’t know that until you buy the entire thing. Now, you just buy those two tracks, $1.98, and you’re on your way. Furthermore, when you really think about it…if you pay 1 dollar for a song and listen to it 4 times (which you know you’ll do if you’re buying it), that’s .25 cents per listen, right around juke box prices (for those that remember those). Keep listening and the math’ll eventually drop you to fractions of a penny per listen. Not a bad deal in my mind. I’ve noticed that the price and ability to preview tracks before buying them has made me a much more intelligent buyer, and I almost never look through my library and think, “I shouldn’t have bought that.” I can’t say the same for some of the CDs in my collection.

Still, so many of this Generation Y grew up with the full force of Napster, LimeWire and others running the show, and still can’t get used to the idea that maybe musicians deserve to have their music bought. While I won’t name any names here, one of the worst culprits of this idea of stolen music is not only a great friend of mine, but also a musician and aspiring attorney. You would think that if ever there was to be someone who would respect the legal rights and compensation of musicians it would be a fellow musician with a legal background, but not the case. Regardless of how much I pay for my music, he has no problem taking it from me for free, and in the end, I believe he feels an inward sense of smug satisfaction that he’s getting away with something, all the while failing to see where that would leave him if his musical career ever got off the ground.

Where the DRM conversation get really interesting is when you match it with the topic of ringtones. Now that phones are mp3 players too, and Apple’s iPhone is running the game in terms of what a hybrid hardware solution has the potential to be, the ringtones of beeps and blips from our Nokia phones has been replaced with full 2-30 second clips of songs. Just when everyone thought the copyrights were locked up for music, you have to now examine them in the context of clips for ringers. According to Gavroche, the reason for this is that the end user agreements for a song and for a ringtone are different. Then the question becomes why. In my mind, once you’ve paid for something, you should be able to use that personally however you see fit. I’m not advocating the free sharing and swapping of music and ringtones among friends, but if I want to burn the song I bought to a CD, listen to it on an mp3 player or program it as a ringtone, I should be able to without additional cost. iTunes, however, requires you to pay an additional .99 cents to turn one of your songs into a ringtone, and they don’t offer a simple solution, within the application, for turning a non-iTunes store purchase into a ringtone.

Now without getting into specifics that could be at odds with the legal standpoints of the companies I’m talking about, I will tell you that there are solutions to this problem out there. GarageBand offers one of them, and a bit of simple maneuvering of songs within iTunes will help you create a free, custom ringtone from any song in your library. It’s really quite easy once you’ve learned the process and done it a few times, but it still requires multiple steps in order to “trick” iTunes into thinking the clip you’ve made is a ringtone. The problem here is that having already established one payment and method for protecting music, the industry wants to change what and how much you pay to use music you already own in a different way from what they intended when you purchased it. It smacks of revisionism…already late to the party in terms of recognizing the moving trends towards digital music, the industry again finds itself behind the game. “What? You mean people might want to use the .99 cent track as a ringtone and not just a song to listen to? Better find a way to make some money off that.”

As someone who supports the idea of paying artists for their work in a way that is fair and equitable both to them as the producer and me as the consumer, I don’t have a problem with DRM. I don’t think it really solves anything (there’s always multiple ways to “unlock” a track), but if it helps the industry feel better about digitally distributing their product, in the end it benefits me as a listener. But rights are rights, and once a song is purchased, be it an mp3 or a hard copy CD, the purchaser needs to be able to take that song to any device or medium they want, even if that requires copying it for multiple locations. It’s one thing to limit the ease with which people illegally share music with one another. It’s another thing to try to step in and dictate how and when the consumer enjoys their purchase. That’s why my ringer is The Fall by Blake Leyh. So stick it to those DRM people, People, and make your whole library into unpaid for ringtones! Go crazy! That is, of course, if you already own it.

Record Execs: Stupid, or Just Plain Greedy?

published
on December 2, 2007
by
ACtual
in music and technology
. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , , .

Read an interesting article this week in Wired. Actually, the entire magazine was phenomenal and prompted me to order a subscription, but one article jumped out. Examining the current state of the music industry through the eyes of Universal Music Group‘s CEO Doug Morris, author Seth Mnookin prompts a series of new perspectives and questions surrounding the idea of where exactly we are now and where we are likely to go in the future with regards to music rights management, distribution and artist promotion. All of which, obviously, are keen topics in the mind of MixMatchers.

Morris is an industry ancient. If it weren’t for the fact that the past several years have seen him hammering other companies over rights to use and sell the Universal catalog with great success, he’d be a dinosaur. But he has. He’s been very busy, limiting who can use the Universal catalog and when, making YouTube sign an agreement with regards to the licensing, he’s engaged in a lawsuit with Myspace, and he has even gotten Microsoft to give Universal $1 for every Zune music player sold because they could be used to play music that wasn’t directly paid for by the listener.

So why’s he involved in all these digital disputes at the moment? It boils down to the record industry turning an ignorant eye in the 90’s to the idea that the huge profit margins on CDs and the public’s willingness to buy them couldn’t be eradicated by something as non-tangible and silly as a, um, what was it called again? Oh, yea, mp3. When you look at this period in time, it would be easy from an outside perspective to see clearly and rationally that the record labels didn’t want to go digital for fear of losing the justification for the large profit margins created by CDs. So rather than get out in front of the mp3 movement and attempt to control its direction, record companies dug in. The obvious initial example is the first assault on Napster. When Apple launched the iTunes store, they were only able to get major labels to sign on because when you break it down, Macs are a small percentage of the population, so how much could they possibly damage the sale of CDs? Of course, this is before the Windows iTunes was released….I doubt Jobs told the execs THAT when he was pitching them on letting him sell their music on the web.

But is Morris willing to concede that they took the wrong road by ignoring and attacking mp3s instead of going along, and are now paying for it dearly? Not really. I laughed out loud when he states in the article, “That’s a misconception writers make all the time, that the record industry missed this. They didn’t. They just didn’t know what to do.” Please. You didn’t know what to do? You mean, you couldn’t think of a way for digital music to make as much for you as CDs, so you chose not to know what to do? This is the part of the article where having read about the ascension in the ranks of Morris, I start to ask if it was because he was an accomplished and intelligent individual that could continually renovate an industry, or simply a good company man with a knack for turning a profit. If you say you didn’t get into mp3s because you “didn’t know what to do,” you’re either a liar or a fool. You could have easily figured it out if you took the long view (that mp3s and the digital music industry will eventually make you more money as consumers have greater control over what they want) versus the short view (these damn mp3s are cutting into our profit margin and need to go).

Well, they did sign up with Apple, and the article points out an interesting quandry: Jobs sold labels on the smaller population of Macs and the proprietary DRM Apple uses. While these are the types of security blankets that the industry was looking for for their revenue streams, they neglected to look at the fact that because the Apple DRM tracks will only work on an iPod through iTunes, and iPod has singlehandedly crushed the entire mp3 player market, they’ve created a golem in the iTunes store. According to the article, 22 percent of ALL music in the US this year was downloaded from the iTunes store. Furthermore, Jobs consistently blames the mess of mp3 players and protected songs on the labels, which leaves him looking pretty good.

So now Morris is taking a different route. Extremely protective over rights and licensing, Morris has decided that the next battlefront needs to make sure that Apple doesn’t run away with the entire digital music industry. By backtracking on his obsessive need for protection, he’s come to the conclusion that the only way to unseat Apple is to offer DRM free music in a wide variety of ways that entice people away from the iPod (good luck with that buddy).

This is a man who clearly has mixed priorities. First it was no mp3s, then it was DRM mp3s. Now it’s DRM-free and a non-exclusive iTunes agreement. His battle cry is that stolen and shared music, or albums sold for $10 when coffee is $3 a cup, are severely damaging the artists. In reality, they’re cutting into his profits. When you continue to pay the artist the same amount, and the net return on the profit takes a hit, it doesn’t matter if you’re selling CDs for 10 or 30 dollars, because you haven’t changed what you’re paying the artist! Now Morris faces an even steeper challenge with the fact that bands (by which I mean Radiohead and the inevitable overflow of copy-cats) realize they can take ALL the profit if they just release it themselves.  Artists that care about the integrity of their message, such as Immortal Technique, have already shunned record label overtures in pursuit of music that doesn’t need to conform to an executive’s idea of music, and profit that doesn’t involve paying out to someone who has had almost no hand in the creative process.

Unfortunately, as evidenced by his continuing victories in the fights he picks, Morris isn’t a dinosaur yet. But you have to wonder when the musicians that he claims to represent, and the fans those musicians want to serve will take a long look in the mirror and realize that together, they can create a place where artists are paid more, the labels that “own” their music don’t get away with highway robbery, and everyone can win. Ancients such as Morris like the win/lose approach (which often results in a lose/lose anyways) over the win/win approach. But with greedy record execs like this, and a populace gradually seeing that they don’t deserve to be slaughtered over the cost of a CD that their artist will see pennies on anyways, you have to believe the meteor is coming.