Thank you iPod® people. Thank you for destroying the on-line music industry.
Why do i say that? i mean, sure Uncle Steve loves you (provided you constantly purchase the latest and greatest iPod®s, otherwise he hateses you with all their hearts he does. filthly 4th generation ipods®es owners.) because you bought into his scheme.
You see, in order to feed that shiny little overpriced music player, you have to use iTunes. (Don't give me any crap about "you don't have to buy music off of iTunes" because in order to put music on the little <expletive>®s you still have to use iTunes.) And, surprise, surprise, iTunes is absolutely bloated with offers to sell you music. Including re-selling you tracks that you've already purchased. (Genius marketing, that).
Which you can only play on iPod®s.
See? That's called total lock in because if you ever did sane up and realize that $80 is a helluva lot of money to pay for a 1GB MP3 player with no display or USB port, you're screwed because you can't put the music you bought on iTunes and put it on something that's cheaper and works better. Well, not without burning, re-ripping, re-cataloging and trashing a lot of CDs at least (or otherwise breaking the law). No, you're happy to be Steve's little cash cow so that you can think you look as cool as those dancing silhouette people when you really look more like Elaine in black face.
Yep, you made uncle Steve a helluva lot of money.
So much moolah that now Uncle Paul wants to get in on it.
So now Microsoft is killing off their original plan of just licensing music for any non-ipod MP3 player in favor of their total lock in platform Zune®. (Remember kids, Zune®, in Hebrew it means "truth in advertising".) Oh sure, you could use Yahoo! Music, or Rhapsody to get whatever tracks, but truth be told, Real (who owns the afore mentioned Rhapsody) is working on their own DRM.
So, lets take a count, shall we?
- iTunes
- Zune.net
- Real Audio
- Legacy Plays for Sure
For those with poor math skills, that's four independent, non-interoperable, complete lock-in music systems looming in your future. Needless to say, with that sort of in-fighting, it won't be too long before we see each of these dividing labels up so they can score "exclusive" rights. In fact, don't be too horribly surprised if that in the coming years you have to sink around $1,000US in order to buy enough of these siloed players so that you can, you know, actually listen to the music you want to listen to.
What? Rip the music from CDs, you say? Have you tried that recently? No, my friend, unless you still have a working CD player made in the early days of the Naught's, you'll find that it's growing increasingly difficult to do that, because those shiny silver disks are specially crafted to not work on your computer. And frankly, Sony taught us that sometimes it's a damn good thing they don't.
Ok, so there will probably be a thriving market for "ever-increasing-shades-of-black/gray" music including using DRM crackers and P2P services, but let's face it, all the music and player industries have to do is block non-signed media from playing on their devices and they'll have you. This, of course, will be done via the dedicated iTunes / Real Player / Windows Media interface that "fails to recognize" some unsigned track and "accidentally" doesn't load it. (They do offer to "correct" the track by re-encoding it/signing after checking the audio fingerprint of the file against their archive to ensure that it's not an evil pirated file, or by offering you the opportunity to purchase the track from their store or maybe re-rip it from the original CD provided it's not blocked by the label.)
All because of you, iPod® people.
Thanks a boat-load.
