DRM – Page 2 – Auxiliary Memory

What Does the Demise of the CD and DRM Mean?

Yesterday I went to my favorite Borders bookstore and was shocked to see that they had removed their entire music shopping area. Life is getting mighty hard for record stores and High Fidelity type dudes. Now, it’s been awhile since I bought any CDs at Borders, so I won’t miss it, but seeing that big gapping space in the back of the store made me realize that the era of the CD is over.

If you go to Google News and search on DRM, you’ll see all the announcements about how Rhapsody Music will now sell DRM-free songs and albums. I’m in the process of ripping my old CD collection, which is very time consuming. From now on, whenever I buy a new song or album I’ll just get the digital edition. The last CDs my wife and I bought were a few Beatles titles we didn’t already have. Beatles For Sale might have been our last CD purchase.

It’s a whole new world for music fans, that’s been evolving since the advent of the MP3 player, and especially since the iPod. But what does this paradigm shift mean?

Cover Art

When music albums shifted from LPs to CDs, cover art moved from major galleries to refrigerator art. Going from CD to MP3 we lose the art altogether. I think a marketing angle record companies should pursue is adding cover art to sales of digital albums. I’d recommend setting up a free standard for desktop art gallery software, like I envisioned in Inventions Wanted #4 – The Desktop Art Gallery. Or at least back existing desktop software like Webshots. Then if buyers select a whole album to buy, reward them with several desktop scenes of music related pop art.

Liner Notes

Another feature to be missed is liner notes. I loved the liner notes on the old huge 12″ record jackets, but hated the microscopic booklets that came with CDs. It’s time to bring back good liner notes with lyrics and band/fan info in elegantly designed Acrobat Reader files that size to the computer screen. Maybe music lovers don’t buy albums because they aren’t the art form they used to be. I know aficionados that still buy vinyl records because they miss the whole experience that was once part of buying an album.

Shopping and Listening

Hanging out in records stores used to a great way to waste time and even a prime activity for dates. No wonder sales are down. Without the word-of-mouth recommendations gained from social record buying there’s not a lot of incentive to shop for music like there used to be. See my post, “Why Has Listening to Music Become as Solitary as Masturbation?” Record companies need to invent software for FaceBook that puts people together for song listening parties.

Also, online record stores like iTunes, Rhapsody and Amazon need to create a virtual store experience that enhances the shopping experience beyond searching a database for new music. One feature I would like to see is accurate discographies that list which songs are in print and are for sale and which are out of print. There’s no reason in our digital universe that all an artist’s work should not stay in print.

Peach Crates

In the old days people stored their albums in wooden crates that made it easy to flip through the LPs one by one and easily see the covers. When you met a new friend you’d go through their LPs to see what kind of person they were. An album collection, with their beautiful artistic covers, were as revealing as a deck of Tarot cards laid out. Kids today can give each other their whole collections, but what good is that? Stolen music is indiscriminate. And long iTunes Library lists are just rows and rows of black and white words. No personality. Record companies should allow music fans to decorate their blogs with songs, cover art and lyrics.

Ownership

The downside of digital music is ownership. Protecting your digital collection is going to be a hassle. Sharing is iffy. Selling used albums on eBay will be weird. Handing down your fabulous collection to your children probably won’t happen.

Personally, I think MP3s are not the ultimate format for music, and even wrote my opinions in “Are MP3s at the End of Their Lifecycle?” My prediction, people are going to discover that owning invisible intangible objects will be a pain, lacking in style and glamour.

Unless music is freely traded, it’s going to be hard for songs to become hits. If songs are freely traded, nobody will want to buy them. Thus, the value of subscription music.

Playlists

Playlists will be the sharing medium of the future. Everyone will be their own DJ – creating musical mood experiences, showing off talents for discovery, and defining identity. Send your favorite playlist creations out to your friends, and if they have a subscription to the songs, they will play. Or build blog pages and web sites around playlists, so when surfers drop by that are subscribers, they will have instant background music.

Next

I expect music to start disappearing from Targets and Walmarts. Not everyone has a MP3 player yet, but the tsunami is bearing down on us. It will be interesting to see what an all digital music world will be like. Won’t it be strange to live in a world and never to see a LP or CD?

Jim

Living with Music Technology

The options of how you played music used to be rather simple. You bought a record, put it on the turntable and played the songs you wanted. Sure, you had to manually pick up the stylus arm and move it carefully to the exact track you wanted, and if you loved a particular song you had to jump out of your chair over and over again to keep that cut playing, but that technology required little thinking because there was little choice. Of course if you were an eight-track or cassette user, the whole job was even more complicated and time consuming, but the tech skills were still pretty low. In the twenty-first century you need to be a skilled computer operator to listen to your favorite tunes.

I am a fan of the Rhapsody Music service where I have no stylus arm to maneuver or cassette tape to position, and I no longer have to worry about scratching records or dealing with skips and pops, but it’s not all snap of my fingers easy. I got so mad at Rhapsody that I almost canceled my subscription last week. My browser kept disconnecting from the service, interrupting the songs I was playing, which was very annoying. And I’ve yet to get the Rhapsody client software to play nice with Vista, even after being patient and giving Rhapsody a year to work out the kinks.

Luckily, the browser client has gotten better and better reducing the effort to listen to music down to being able to remember the name of the artist and track I want – not quite that easy as I get older – typing said information in the input box – again, not perfectly easy because I have to be able to spell those bits of data perfectly – but after that the only required effort to play a song is the physical exertion of a mouse click. Just now I was in the mood to hear live versions of “Eight Miles High” by the Byrds. Within seconds of thinking of this whim I discovered a newly released live CD on Rhapsody and was playing the song. After that I remembered the live cut on the (Untitled)/(Unissued) CD, just a couple mouse clicks a way. This is a breeze compared to the good old days.

This is not to say everything is perfect in tune heaven. Ease of use depends on how closely tied I am to my computer. If I’m writing like I am now, the work required is very minimal. I have to keep a browser window open and pick out songs I want by typing their names and clicking on the play button. If I want to play music away from the computer it gets more complicated, a lot more complicated. My life would be easier if I just accepted I had to buy a compatible MP3 player to match Rhapsody’s requirements and pay the extra $5 a month, but I don’t like listening to music through earbud headphones. What I’d like to do is go out to the living room, sit in my La-Z-Boy and play songs on my big stereo without having to get my lazy butt up whenever I think of a new song to hear.

Before I switched to Vista I had a nice setup with Windows XP, Linksys WiFi, Rhapsody, a Roku SoundBridge M1001 and Firefly Media Server. I collected my favorite music by downloading files from Rhapsody, ran a system service called Firefly that talked to all my music libraries on my computer. The M1001 was installed in the living and attached to my receiver via an optical cable and talked to my computer via WiFi. I was in music nirvana except for all the clicking I had to do on my Roku remote to find songs I wanted to play. And it was annoying I couldn’t stay in my La-Z-Boy to pick out the music either because the LCD readout on the Roku was too small to see across the room.

For months I dreamed of finding a small device that would allow me to control everything from my chair, with the ease of selecting music just like I was at my computer. I thought of laptops, PDAs, and the emerging tech like the Nokia N800 Linux handhelds. Before I could make a decision I upgraded to Vista and my lovely setup stopped working.

I wanted to give Rhapsody the benefit of the doubt and allow them time to catch up with Microsoft, however they never did. I don’t know if it’s my HP computer, Vista or the Rhapsody software client, but they have never worked together. Without the Rhapsody software, its DRM would stop Firefly from sending songs to the M1001. Now I could have easily solved this problem if I was willing to spend a $1000 and buy a Sonos system.

Sonos talks to Rhapsody directly over the Internet, bypassing the computer, and even offers a handheld song selector device that would allow me to keep my fat ass in my chair and play music through my big stereo, or any stereo in my house if I that I was willing to purchase another Sonos connector. Very cool tech but the price is too hot for me right now. I keep hoping Sonos and Rhapsody will become a huge iPod level success and come down in price, plus give me some assurance that they have a long future before I invest even more money in my music system.

My wife recently got a new laptop and gave me back my laptop she had appropriated, so I decided to set it up as a Rhapsody music play station. I reformatted the drive and put a fresh copy of XP on it, and then loaded the Rhapsody client. I then took a patch cord and plugged the mini-headphone jack into the laptop’s headphone jack and the the split left and right channel RCA connects on the other end into my stereo’s CD input jacks. I do believe the optical connector from the M1001 to the optical input on the receiver provided better sound, but I decided to leave the M1001 out of the mix right now. My plan is to use a very long stereo cable so I can sit in my La-Z-Boy and put my laptop in my lap and use it as a music selector.

This isn’t a perfect setup. The laptop is much bigger than a Sonos remote, and it gets hot on my thighs, but it does the job. However, I can imagine a fair number of improvements. Rhapsody provides an extremely large library for $120 a year, but it’s not complete. It appears to offer almost everything in print – there are a few holdouts like The Beatles and Led Zepplin, but that’s not the big problem. I have hundreds of CDs in my library that are out of print and no longer offered by Rhapsody.

Now I could consider Rhapsody’s millions of songs all I need and ignore my older CDs, or I’ll have to develop a dual music library system. I’d have to rip all my old albums to supplement Rhapsody. That would be a huge job that I’ve avoided until now. I’d need a newer laptop with a larger hard drive, and I’d have to make backups and keep them off site, and all of that becomes a long job list that bums out thoughts of my future free weekends. It makes me wonder if the old days were better, even if I could only play one LP in a sitting, and had to leap over to the stereo every time I wanted to skip a song.

I can understand why young people love the portable players like the iPod. If only Steve Jobs would bless the concept of subscription music. I could buy an iPod Touch and call it quits. This past year I finally got rid of all my LPs I had been dragging around the country for forty years. What a relief that was. My wife and I still struggle with storing and shelving all our CDs. Susan hasn’t embraced subscription music because she believes music should only be played in the car where God and 1950s America intended. Susan recently discovered the powers of the iPod for music, a device she previously only used for audio books, and has began ripping her favorite CDs and taking her iPod for rides and leaving the CDs at home. Sadly for me, she’s refused the job of becoming our MP3 librarian though.

Even if we did rip 2000 CDs, I can’t imagine using iTunes with so many songs. Nor can I imagine protecting all those hundreds of gigabytes from now until eternity. In my quest for finding simplicity in my old age I’ve considered following two musical paths. One would be to give up digital music and go back to CDs. The second would be to give up all physical music and live completely with subscription music. There are even portable players out there that will talk directly to Rhapsody over WiFi, but can you imagine what the world will be like when iPhone 3.0 has subscription music? Can you see the future where you have a device that goes anywhere and allows you to just name a song and it plays. That’s pretty damn Sci-Fi to daydream about.

Why choose CD only? Well, they’re paid for, and if I retire to some nice little town and never relocate again until it’s time to move into my coffin, taking care of all those CDs wouldn’t be too bad. However, if I make several more moves before I retire, it will be a blessing to go all digital because my old back doesn’t like humping all those boxes of CDs. To be honest, it’s no choice. Since I’ve been a Rhapsody subscriber I’ve seldom even touched my CD collection. I would make the decision right now if I knew subscription music had a solid future. But except for one blogging friend, I don’t know anyone that enjoys subscription music. All my music fan buddies prefers to buy digital songs or CDs.

No one seems to understand the Valhalla of digital subscription music, so I have to wait to make my decision. If the concept of subscription music goes the way of the 78, LP and SACD, I’ll have to rip my CDs and start buying tunes from Amazon one at a time and figure out how to schlep those gigabytes around for the next thirty years. If only Steve Jobs would give his kiss of approval, owning music would be over. Why has he embraced subscription movies but not music?

I’m in a holding pattern with music technology. I’ve heard that Rhapsody and other subscription music services can be had through Tivos and cable TV boxes, but I haven’t played with such devices. What would be better than Sonos is selecting tracks to play through my HDTV that’s connected to my receiver in the living room with the same remote I use for selecting video to watch. Now that would be converging technology!

When I’m working at my computer I could play Rhapsody. If I was in my living room I could play Rhapsody though my TV. For those people with portable players they can get music over cell phone technology. And when the Internet comes to the car, music subscription could follow me there. What more could I ask for from technology? A chip in my head that when I think of a song it plays in my brain and I hear music like I had a $100,000 stereo system in my head? Would people call us songheads, and look down on us like we’re dopeheads?

Jim

The Problems with DRM Free Audio Books

[Update 12/26/9: Newer MP3 players have come a long way since I wrote this post below. Many now support resume and/or bookmarks on plain MP3 files, making them excellent choices for playing audiobooks.]

DRM (digital rights management also called copy protection) has been a big topic among music fans for years. It’s the software that tries to keep users from illegally copying songs from iTunes, Rhapsody, Napster and other download services. The same technology is used for audio books that come from download sites like Audible.com, iTunes and AudioBookStandDL.com and library services like Overdrive and NetLibrary. Audio books that come on regular CDs can be ripped just like music CDs to make MP3 files. MP3 files are the lowest common denominator of sound files and do not have DRM attached to them. In some cases like library checkout software OverDrive and NetLibrary, DRM can not be removed for obvious reasons.

In the past year the big music publishers have moved away from using copy protection, allowing music buyers to have their music unencumbered by DRM. Now audio book publishers are starting to free downloadable audio books from the same chains. This gives users easy-to-manage MP3 files to own – but at a cost. MP3 files are not the best format to listen to digital audio books – unless the player is programmed with features for the audio book listener.

All things being equal people will want DRM free files but until all the producers of MP3 players get onboard with making their players audio book friendly you might find such files an aggravation to use. The key is to find the right player. Most iPods work well as audio books, but there is a vast array of other players competing with Apple that are cheaper and potentially better products. If you buy a Creative Labs, Sandisk, iRiver, Samsung, Cowon, etc., player you need to make sure it will work with MP3 audio books.

Right now audio books purchased from Audible.com, iTunes, and sites using the OverDrive technology come with DRM encased files, but they are also customized to handle certain features you need to enjoy playing audio books.

Resume and Bookmarks

MP3 audio books are different from music even though they are stored in the same file format. Audio books can run many hours in length and users want to remember their place whenever they stop listening. The MP3 file format has no built-in feature to do that. Files from Audible.com are stored in a format that works with specific digital players that automatically remember the user’s stopping place, plus they are designed to also remember bookmarks with some players. Those features need to be required of all MP3 audio book players.

Many MP3 players have been designed with a resume feature – that is, the player will start up on the file you left off playing last. But if you are listening to a book, switch to listening to music, and return to the book you will have lost your place. Some MP3 players have a bookmarking feature. This is usually a menu choice that sets a return-to-point in the file to help you find your way back. It’s not the same as resume. Audible.com files have multiple-resumes and with some players bookmarks.

Users of iPods can set their MP3 files up in iTunes so they will have multiple-resumes which makes that player among the best for audio book listening. However, iPods are expensive and it would be easier on the user if multiple-resume was built into the player itself.

Multiple-resume feature means if you have five audio books and you switch between them the player remembers wherever you left off in each book. This is the gold standard for audio book listeners. Single resume is the feature that allows you to pick up where you left off on the last file played. This is the minimum feature needed to play audio books without a great deal of aggravation. Imagine trying to find your place every time you return to your book when it’s twenty hours long and has no pages numbers.

A bookmarking feature is a system that allows users to manually tag one or more places in a single audio book, and its a big plus, especially if you want to study or review a book and want return to specific passages. It also allows the user to remember her place if the player does not have resume.

Plain MP3 files have no notion of resume or bookmarks – they are an add-on features to the player you buy, so it’s important to buy the right player. If audio book publishers standardize on the MP3 file format without DRM, then digital audio player manufacturers need to catch up. Apple does the job in software, and users must make the settings in iTunes before they copy their files to their iPods. Other players handles things differently.

There are car CD players that will remember the user’s place when they turn off their car. Such hardware resume control should be added to all portable MP3 players. In fact, the hardware should support resume on every file and not the last played. And if the manufacturer really wants to endear themselves with audio bookworms they should build in bookmarking. Some players do this but it’s hard to find out if a particular model has these features because new models don’t always follow the standards of previous models. Below is a couple recent links that can help.

File Size and Number

I’ve seen audio books as long as 80 hours. A typical 15 hour book can be one 300 megabyte MP3 file or ten 30 megabyte files or even 200 small files, depending on how the seller breaks them up. Audible.com tends to break books up in 7-8 hour chunks. eMusic.com sells their MP3 audio books in a collection of many small files. They do that because they know people do not always have resume or bookmarks and expect people to remember what track they left off on. That also encourages people to finish a track before stopping. This is a very poor way to listen to audio books.

If you rip a CD audio book or buy an audio book from eMusic the best thing to do is merge the tracks into fewer larger files. This makes managing your book much easier. If all players had multiple-resume I doubt booksellers would market audio books with 200 tracks. When I rip a CD book of 15 CDs I make it into 15 tracks, rather than 150-200. But I’d rather have the book in 2 parts like Audible.com and iTunes sell.

I use CDex to rip CDs with multiple tracks into a single file, but iTunes can do it too. MP3Merge is the utility I use to merge MP3 files into bigger files when I buy a book that comes with lots of parts. This is also useful to merge podcasts – because many sites like to make their longer downloads as a series of files. With MP3Merge you can put them back together into one file, which is easier to manage in your library.

One reason why publishers want to give up DRM on audio books is the hassle they face with supporting players. If they make their audio book plain MP3 files then the hassle of support is up to you, the user. Selling the books as MP3 files with multiple tracks is marketing the book to work on the widest possible range of players. Anything that can play a MP3 file can play the book. That doesn’t mean the book will be easy to use.

It does mean people can go buy cheap $25 MP3 players and start listening to audio books on the go. The cheapest current players tend to offer 1 gigabyte of space with no display. The best way to listen to an audio book on such a device is to load it with one large file and expect it to have resume. Thus it becomes a single-function device – an audio book – you turn it on, listen for awhile, shut it off, turn it back on and start where you left off. When you’re finished you delete the book and load another.

If you get an audio book from eMusic.com and it comes as 200 files and you’re trying to manage them on a player with no display and you lose your place, you’re going to get very pissed off. Another reason why publishers are now wanting to abandon DRM is because they want to sell audio books outside of iTunes/Audible because they know that most people have iPods and this would allow more audio book merchants to compete with Apple.

PC versus Mac

The PC-Mac dichotomy spreads over the digital audio player world. Microsoft promoted its DRM and non-iPod MP3 manufacturers followed behind their lead. If a publisher supported Microsoft’s DRM then that book wouldn’t play on an iPod because Apple uses a different DRM. Many people can check out digital audio books from their libraries through the Overdrive or NetLibrary systems. These systems use the PlayForSure DRM designed by Microsoft. People with iPods go to their library and are told they can’t participate. Conversely, people with Creative, Sandisk, iRiver and other players go to iTunes to buy songs and books, and they are told, sorry, but you don’t count.

This is why publishers want to abandon DRM. They may have to deal with pirates, but they don’t offend their users or handhold them while supporting numerous devices. This is a good things, except like I’ve been talking about above, plain MP3 files aren’t ready for prime time audio book listening.

Right now I’m sticking with Audible.com and its DRM system. Audible.com has made deals with many hardware companies, including Apple. Some players will even work with Audible and OverDrive/NetLibrary. Because they also play plain MP3 files too, they will work with DRM free files. Audible.com is also the cheapest way to buy audio books, but Audible.com sells DRM files.

Amazon, now that it has bought Audible.com, may change things because they are in the DRM-free music business. They may make buying digital audio books a breeze, but without Audible.com’s extra effort to make digital audio books practical, I’m not sure if Amazon will improve things. If they do end up selling DRM-free audio book downloads, lets hope they promote the best players to use for listening to these books and use their clout to get all DAP (digital audio player) makers to support audio books.

Digital Media Libraries

Ultimately we do not want to mess with ripping CDs or merging files. We want to just buy a digital audio book and download it. From there we will have two options. Some people like having a media library program like iTunes or Windows Media Player to manage all their files and other users like to store their files in folders they control. MP3 works with either option so that should make most people happy. Some DAP players only work with a media library to transfer files to the player’s drive, other DAP players work like flash drives and you can just drag and drop books onto them.

I tend to think the majority of people will want a media librarian. Such library software can track songs, audio books, podcasts, videos, photos, etc. However, libraries break down when the user gets too many files, but I expect that will be fixed by Apple and Microsoft in the future. I would like to advocate that a file structure be designed to work across platforms and design them so any media librarian can use that structure without altering it. That way you can switch librarians as the years progress without screwing up your file folder of songs, books, photos, podcasts and videos. But this might be too much pie in the sky idealism. Imagine:

\Library

\AudioBooks

\Author1

\BookTitle1

\BookTitle2

\eBooks

\Music

\Artist1

\AlbumTitle1

\AlbumTitle2

\Photos

\Podcasts

\Videos

Another reason to desire standard folder structures for media is the emerging wireless media servers. These devices allow you to play songs, books, videos and photos on your big screen TV in another room, or channel sound to a bedroom stereo system. Companies like Sonos even make remotes that allow users to select what they want to hear and play it in any part of the house without being at a computer. Wouldn’t it be great to have a system near the bed and tell your computer to play a book and set it with a sleep timer? Standardizing on DRM free files and standard folder structures for storing those files help these media servers.

Right now you buy a media server to match a particular system and DRM, like iTunes or Windows Media, but they try to be as compatible as possible. My RoKu SoundBridge can get DRM songs from Rhapsody and its folders, and DRM-free iTune songs from the iTunes folder, and songs from my Windows Media folder. It’s a pain in the ass to try to remember where I put a song though. Did I get it from iTunes or Rhapsody? See why I want a standard folder structure?

For now we must campaign and even protest to get DAP makers to delivery on multiple-resume and bookmarking features for us bookworms. We can work on media servers later.

Jim

Update #1: I’ve heard back from several online friends and there is no consensus as to which player to recommend. The Cowon and Creative Zen Plus were both mentioned. All I can recommend is the iPod with a screen. I don’t recommend the Shuffle for audio books.

Update #2: OverDrive announces it will sell DRM free audio books to consumers. This is huge. Digital audio players (DAPs) and audio books are changing the way people read books. OverDrive’s is advertising their MP3 files will play on virtually any DAP, including the iPod, Zune, Creative Labs and smart phone devices.

Are MP3s at the End of Their Lifecycle?

I have a lot of LPs I’m about to give away but I’m torn about whether or not I should try and save them as MP3 files first. Nowadays I prefer to listen to music through Rhapsody Music, which has a giant library of music. Even though there are several million songs in their collection they don’t have everything. Not by a long shot. Music albums are like books, they go out of print, often to become forgotten, sometimes to become rare lost gems.

When CDs became the new music format decades ago people waited for their favorite LPs to be re-mastered as CDs. A lot of LPs got new lives as CDs, but probably only a small fraction of all LPs. Now with digital music, a fraction of all CDs are reborn as MP3, WMA or AAC files. I’m talking about legally published music – if you count illegal, then probably a greater percentage has been reprinted on the net by fans. If would be great to have a music database like Internet Movie Database that tracked all the various incarnations of albums and how to find them now.

Most of my albums don’t even inspire me to replay them much less spend the time to record them to MP3. I even have a Sony turntable designed for use with my computer. I’m pretty good at using Audacity to record MP3 files, but even if I did it the sloppy way of making one MP3 per LP side, it takes about an hour an album to convert. Dividing the side recordings into individual song files and entering the song data into the ID3 tags would add even more time. It would be easier to see if they are on Rhapsody and just record those that aren’t. Buying would also be cheaper than wasting my time.

Doing some spot checking shows me just how many albums Rhapsody doesn’t have in its collection. Rhapsody seems to have every Bob Dylan album back to his first one. For Buffalo Springfield they have their third and a couple hits albums, but a year or so ago I could have sworn I played the first two albums on Rhapsody. In other words, there is no guarantee that Rhapsody will have any specific album in the future. I’ve often wondered how Rhapsody acquires music. I assumed if they had a deal with the publisher they would offer everything that publisher had in its library. I’m now guessing publishers control access to parts of their collections. It almost appears if a CD is in print and available for sale it might be included, but if the CD is pulled from the market it’s also pulled from Rhapsody.

Future of Music: Owned Or Subscribed?

The music world sits at the crossroad of many possible futures. Ian Rogers points out in his blog “Convenience Wins…” – the music industry has been fumbling around for eight years and finally AmazonMP3.com beta points to a practical future. I, on the other hand see a different future as described in my blog entry, “DRM and iTunes and Rhapsody Music” that the subscription model should be the future of digital music. If Rogers is right then I need to record my music. If I’m right eventually everything should show up on a subscription service. Most people want to own music – and buying MP3 songs from Amazon is perfect for that mindset. It baffles me that subscription music isn’t the obvious choice because it’s so damn cheap. For the price of 10 songs I can listen to as many songs as I can squeeze into my month of musical enjoyment. To me it’s worth $120 a year just to preview all the hundreds of new albums that I try out. And playing music through a subscription service makes music listening so convenient that it’s about like switching from normal TV to DVR TV watching.

I don’t mind paying .89 cents a song, that’s cheap enough. What I hate is managing all those files I must save for the rest of my life. If you study science and science fiction you’ll know that technology is moving towards machines with fewer moving parts. Digitizing the world means moving information off of physical formats and onto binary documents. An iPod like device that instantly acquired songs off the net in real time would be the ultimate Music Mecca for listening to songs. This is about as simple as I can imagine for the final form of music storage and distribution. 78s to LPs to CDs to MP3s to Subscription music.

However, if I’m wrong I’m giving up a lot of treasured songs when I give away my LPs. And since I’m also thinking about thinning out my CD collection, I’ll be losing access to even more songs. Betting on the subscription music future might be dangerous, but it’s the one I want. I readily admit the ownership model might win out. However, Rhapsody is moving subscription music on cell phones, Tivos, and cable TV services, and music publishers are talking about selling subscription libraries to internet providers. Music everywhere might be more powerful than music hording.

The Past is a Heavy Weight to Carry Forward

It would be great if Rhapsody and its competitors became the Library of Congress of music history so I could always depend on finding the music I want to hear with just a few keystrokes. Since I can’t, I worry that I should save my old LPs and CDs, or at least convert them to MP3. But I don’t want the burden of becoming a digital librarian. I’ve spent a lot of money over the last forty-five years buying this music so I should want to hang on to it, but I don’t. My music collection has become a heavy weight on my shoulders. It’s connected to a lot of memories too. I could put my albums in the order I bought them and create a timeline of my life. On the other hand, I’m getting old and running out of future years, and life is busy and I don’t have a lot of free time, so managing these physical tokens of my past has become time consuming work.

Several times in my life I have had to give up my record collection and years later I always regretted that and would hunger to hear long lost albums. Sometimes they would be reprinted as CDs, or I’d shop with rare record dealers and re-buy vinyl treasures. Many though, are even forgotten by my memory. I seldom play my LPs anymore. Every couple of years I want to make space on my shelves and I get them out and find that I still love them and put them back. This time they are going. I met a young woman that collected 78s and LPs but lost her collection to Katrina. I figure she will give them a good home.

Letting Go of the Past Makes Room for the Future

I always loved discovering new music so my collection really is a form of external memory. I’ve known a lot of fellow baby-boomers that never got past the 1960s or 1970s in their music tastes. Evidently they reach a point where they had enough music to cherish and that was good enough. When I go onto Rhapsody each day I have the choice of looking up something old or trying something new. Feeding my nostalgic moods keeps me spinning old songs. Hunger for new rushes pushes me to find new songs. I probably own 20,000 songs now, but Rhapsody allows me to try 4,000,000+ new songs.

Giving up my LP collection, and even my CD collection frees me from the physical world and lets me live in the non-material digital world. I can’t help but wonder if that’s a higher plane of musical existence, a more spiritual state of mind beyond the crass world of ownership and hording and living in the past? The time I would spend being a music librarian could instead be spent on being a music fan.

The Ultimate Playlist

Let’s play the old stranded on a desert island game. Let’s imagine I can’t keep everything, but I’m allowed to keep my all-time favorite songs. That might be an interesting project that wouldn’t require too much work and time and even fit on a memory stick or flash memory player. Such a collection could be a hedge against Rhapsody going out of business. Even if I decide to keep my top songs, what format should I save them in? The music industry is moving towards 256kps MP3 files, but audiophiles prefer FLAC or lossless recordings. I could buy an Olive OPUS Nº5 and start feeding my CDs to it and then pack them away in the attic. Then over time I could delete the songs I don’t like and I’d end up with my perfect playlist. That takes a lot of work, and what happens if my OPUS dies? I can’t imagine owning a stereo device for thirty more years.

How long will Rhapsody or iTunes last? CBS, NBC and ABC have been around my whole life providing me with TV entertainment. Is there any chance that Rhapsody could become a music network with their staying power? Geekboys on the net like to talk about the MP3 revolution changing the music world and how the old guard better get with the new paradigm. What if MP3 is already old hat? Net music might now be the new MP3 and they don’t even know it.

I’m giving away my LPs and I’ve already packed up my CDs and put them in a closet. I’ve stopped buying CDs except for gifts. I will only buy MP3s from Amazon for songs Rhapsody doesn’t provide, but I’m leaning towards not even buying MP3s at all. I’m wondering if AmazonMP3 isn’t just as backwards as the DRMed iTunes?

Final Format

Subscription music could be delivered on MP3 but its WMA now because of the DRM restrictions. It doesn’t have to be DRMed any more than songs sold one at a time. And it could be broadcast in FLAC or whatever current technology is the best suited for the network technology of the time. The burden of formats and storage would be pushed to the broadcaster. Why should there be millions of copies of Feist’s “1234” sitting on hard drives all over the world when it just needs to be on a few servers? The net should trump hard drives. I don’t buy DVD movies anymore because Netflix is too damn convenient and cheap. Why should I own songs when net music like Rhapsody is available?

The real questions are still: What happens to all those forgotten out-of-copyright albums? Can subscription music services ever be allowed to be complete like a Library of Congress? Will copyright and publishing rights limit subscription music to marketing whims or fracture it into too many services to be practical? Technology allows for the network delivery of anything song you can think of – but will legal and marketing issues destroy that potential? If you consider illegal P2P trading, the reality is almost here. Can the music industry find a marketing system that satisfies the publishers, the artists and the music fans? Will AmazonMP3 become the legal front-end to a vast distributor of stolen shared music? One reason I would buy a song from AmazonMP3 now is to give it away. I would prefer my friends would all use Rhapsody so all I had to do was hit the Share button, but if they aren’t a member and I want them to hear a song I like, I have to find an alternative way. What if I hear a great song and buy it from AmazonMP3 and give it to seven of my friends? And this becomes the norm, how long will that sales model last? Any ultimate music system has to account for music sharing. Subscription music has that built in as long as all users are subscribers. Is that practical? What if I’m a Rhapsody subscriber and three of my friends are Napster users and four are Zune users?

We have a long way to go before we have a stable music system. Maybe this is just another reason why most people of my generation stopped buying music. See my blog, “Why Has Listening to Music Become as Solitary as Masturbation?”

James Wallace Harris 10/10/7

DRM and iTunes and Rhapsody Music

With all the recent discussion of EMI and other music companies releasing their music catalogs with DRM-free files, I had to wonder what will happen with subscription music services like Rhapsody Music, Napster, Yahoo Music!, Urge, Virgin Digital, etc. Subscription services offer unlimited access to giant catalogs of songs, and they use DRM systems to make sure the music is locked down from thieves. You can boogie just as long as your monthly payments keep coming. Could subscription services work without digital rights management (DRM) systems like so many are campaigning for the buy-by-the-song businesses?

I’ve been using Rhapsody for awhile now and I’ve essentially stopped buying CDs. I have a collection of a couple thousand CDs and LPs but I’ve stored them away. Digital music subscriptions are just too damn convenient over both getting my lazy ass out of my chair and tracking down CDs I never re-alphabetize or ripping and maintaining digital collections on my always changing computers. I can’t believe anyone would be buying digital music from iTunes or any other pay-by-the-song services. Ownership, whether digital or physical means work – librarian type work of organizing, filing and preserving. Buying files without DRMs will mean easier backups, but you still have to manage your tracks – and after awhile iTunes gets unwieldy with large collections.

Physical CDs are great for playing anywhere, lending to friends, and getting the maximum sound quality. MP3 songs are great for making compilation CDs to share with friends or for emailing single songs to distant friends. Rhapsody allows for sharing songs, but your friends need to be members of Rhapsody. Rhapsody just started selling MP3 DRM-free music – so now it’s possible buy a song and share it – although I don’t think that’s the purpose of the new feature. It’s doubtful the industry wants Rhapsody to transmit all their subscription tunes over the net via unencrypted MP3 files, but would that be so bad? If everyone subscribed to music would it matter? The key to subscription music is the convenience of not worrying about owning files.

Rhapsody does all the work for me. I think of a song or album or artist and type in the name in the Rhapsody search box. If it’s there, and most of the time it is, I just play the music. When I’m tired of listening I close the window. Rhapsody does allow me to download the song files to my computer, but I don’t use that feature. First, I don’t use a portable player. I play songs through my computer or my stereo system via Wi-Fi and Firefly Media Server. I do have an iPod but I use that for audio books. When I’m at work I play Rhapsody through Internet Explorer and my computer’s speakers. If you do have a compatible player you can download files to your player. If you want, you can download thousands of albums to your computer, as much as it can hold, and as long as you pay your bill the songs will play. But is that the ultimate way to experience music?

When I was a kid I used to have this Sci-Fi fantasy that I could mentally play music in my head and it would sound like I was listening to a loud stereo. Just think of the song and my neurons would dance. Rhapsody is close to that. Rhapsody even has players that use Wi-Fi to connect to its services. I doubt I will ever have music transmitted directly to my brain, but if Rhapsody (or competitors) were available anywhere I went, then that will be good enough. Once you hear music in that light you realized that DRM locks aren’t needed. I don’t want to own the music. I don’t want to store the music. I don’t want to manage music files. I just want to listen.

Right now if Rhapsody took the locks off its songs people would steal them blind. That’s because some people can’t see the utopian view of listening to subscription music. Why horde songs when you can listen to what you want when you want and where you want? I do all of this for $120 a year – Yahoo and others even offer cheaper deals. Rhapsody currently charges more to people who want to download songs to put on compatible portable players, but if they ever perfect Internet everywhere on portable devices that wouldn’t be needed.

Finding Music v. Buying Music

I was just reading an interview with Daniel Radcliffe who told about where he was and what he was doing when reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. At one point he mentioned he was listening to a group called Takk and their album Sigur Rós, a band I’ve never heard of before. So I fired up my browser, typed Takk into Rhapsody search box and began listening to it. That’s how I find out about music now. Oh sure, I could have zipped over to the iTunes store and bought it for $9.99, but why? For the price of one album I get to listen to them all. I’ve gone beyond how to afford music. And I never wanted to be in the business of stealing music. For my ten bucks of legal rental payment, I’m now in the music finding business. I can’t believe kids steal when legal music is so damn cheap.

If the music industry could acquire X million subscribers worldwide they would probably make as much money as they used to make selling physical albums but without the costs and overhead of actually making, shipping and selling CDs. Once you get past the part about owning music you realize the problem becomes finding great new music. And Rhapsody has many features that help there too. One of them is the ability to send songs, albums or playlists to other Rhapsody members. If I discover a great new album, I can hit the share button and send it to my friends. They don’t get the actual song, but a link to where to play the music. That’s all that’s needed. The holy grail of musicians and music publishers is to get millions to people to start playing a song. Having easy access makes that much easier.

This will be a major paradigm shift in the world of music. Why listen to radio? Just request a playlist or music channel if you want surprises and randomness. This allows everyone to become music programmers by building playlists. No more mixed tapes and CDs. Create a playlist and email it to your girlfriend. When you meet new people you won’t flip through their CD collection, you can request their favorite playlists and listen to the music. You can make friends by having your playlists analyzed and compared to others. It’s a whole different world.

The greatest thing about subscription music services is discovering new music. You can try anything you want. On Tuesdays when new music comes out just play as many new albums as you can. You aren’t restricted. When Stephen King lists his top 25 rock songs in Entertainment Weekly, just pop over to Rhapsody and listen to them.

Subscription services will have to maintain their DRM systems until the mass of people realize that owning music is a pain, but eventually DRMs won’t matter.

Where Subscription Music Fails

Since 1964 I’ve been buying music, and even though I’ve had to sell my collection a couple of times since then, I’ve gathered a couple thousand albums – far more than I want to rip and preserve on hard disk. Rhapsody is great for the new stuff and the famous stuff, and crappy songs from artists that only their mothers would buy, but it is far from complete. I have a lot of albums that Rhapsody doesn’t. And if I want to play, “Fresh Air” by Quicksilver Messenger Service, I have to dig through my closet. That really puts some holes in my musical heaven.

For subscription music to really work it needs to be complete. Every online retailer should have access to everything imaginable – and publishers should allow the various online subscription libraries to promote music in whatever fashion they want. No need to have a big brother monopoly, but it would defeat the idea if I had to subscribe to a bunch of services just to get the variety I want.

The next big problem is sound quality. Compressed music is pretty damn good, but it ain’t stereophile quality. In my ideal dream music system I don’t want to own and store music, so it doesn’t matter how big the files are just as long as the music can be piped to me in real time with no interruptions. My assumption is technologies will only get better and transmission speeds will only get faster, so music libraries should have no trouble improving the quality.

A side effect of all this should be the end of the format wars. The wizards behind the Internet curtain will worry about such details. We might have to upgrade our browsers, sound cards and drivers from time to time, but that’ll just give computer companies reasons to sell us new computers. A few years ago when SACD music came out I expected to repurchase all my favorite albums – the ones I first bought on LPs and then later bought again as CDs. I didn’t because SACD music didn’t catch on, but under my dream system, instead of buying all new albums I’d just need to buy a new sound card and speakers.

Another music related fantasy I have is all the black boxes and wires will disappear and music will magically come from nowhere. It would be great if they could put SACD quality surround sound in tiny little speakers built into my monitor. I love the look of those new 24″ iMacs – and what a thrill it would be to have one if it worked like the Apple sales photos without a rat’s nest of wires docked at the back and produced Bose Wave audio quality sound without any visible speakers. Oh, drat, Steve Jobs doesn’t believe in subscription music.

What’s Playing Right Now

Rhapsody is good enough now that I very seldom get out a LP or CD. Right now I’m listening to Joe Cocker from 1969 and 1970. I’m listening to albums I haven’t owned or seen in years. Rhapsody is one great trip down memory lane. I often play albums that I remember flipping by in stores years ago when I was a teenager and my bagboy job at the Coconut Grove Kwik-Chek wouldn’t allow me to buy everything. And 128kbps WMA is probably better sounding than my old $199 stereo I bought in twelve payments from the Columbia Record Club in 1968 – my first experience in credit. I play my music through a sound card plugged into a Sony amp that’s connected to Bose bookshelf speakers sitting on each end of my computer desk, so I sit in the sweet spot. Rhapsody’s web based interface has become so good that I often skip the full client version. I just flip through the library and click the little plus sign to add songs to the playing queue. I can’t believe people actual pay for songs 99 cents at a time and then have to worry about saving them. Hell, I would have already run up a $20 bill just writing these last few paragraphs

What Happens If Subscription Music Fails

My worry is the music industry will decide to call it quits on subscription music. If they do I don’t expect to start buying DRM songs for 99 cents. I might buy a few $1.29 DRM free songs, but what I’d do is rip my CD collection, create a pool of favorite songs I’ve discovered over the last fifty years and go musical Rip Van Wrinkle and time travel through my tuneverse. Which is what I think many people have already done and explains why CD sales are down – they’ve just checked out from the system. If Apple has sold a 100 million iPods and one billion songs, it sounds like selling digital songs isn’t that big of a business since on average people are only buying ten songs. I wonder how many rental songs have been played in that same time?

I’m not sure about the health of subscription music. I know few people who use it. I show it to friends all the time. I think most of my baby-boomer music friends are content with their small collections of CDs which they ripped with iTunes. But real music fans should try subscription music so they can try new stuff. It’s nothing at all to try out several new albums of unknown artists each week. If subscription music goes the way of SACD then I doubt I’ll be trying as many new groups as I am now.

Can Artists Make Money From Subscription Music

I’m playing “In A Big Country” and I wonder if the old group Big Country will make any pennies from my few moments of nostalgic pleasure. With enough subscribers it’s possible for the music industry to generate the same billions they used to earn by selling CDs, but will any of that moola reach the deserving talent? Are there accounting systems that let the artists see how many times their songs have been played? That could be pretty cool info to track. If I pay $10 for a month of music, that’s 1,000 pennies. If I play 33.33 songs a day, that would equal to 1 cent per song per play.

To earn a buck a group would need 100 plays – to earn a million bucks would require 100 million plays. At a royalty of 10 percent, a group would have to sell 1 million $10 CDs to make a million dollars. Since most fans play their favorite songs over and over again, groups wouldn’t have to reach 100 million people, but get 10 million people to play the song 10 times or 1 million people to play the song 100 times. Thus it’s quite possible to make money at a penny a play, but I doubt the music industry is that generous to artists with their subscription income. At a tenth of a cent per play it would take a billion plays to generate a million bucks. I bet I played Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone” at least a thousand times, maybe a good deal more.

I also figure the $10 a month fee Rhapsody charges won’t always stay that low. It used to be $9.95 a month paid monthly, but the by monthly fee has since gone up, so I have to pay by the year to get that low rate. If the subscription services could get 100 million users world-wide they would be in the 12 billion dollar annual revenue range and we know at least 100 million people world-wide love music enough to buy an iPod. If everyone paid the $15 monthly fee that goes with having a portable player, that industry figures grows to 18 billion. It’s quite easy to see the music business making plenty of money via the subscription model. Whether they pay their artists any more than what they paid when they sold music as LPs or CDs is another issue.

Conclusion

If the music business could get the majority of their clients to support the subscription model there would be no need for DRM systems. No one would want to clog up their drives to horde music or waste their precious free time trying to acquire and manage files. If my record collection were digital files I’d have 20,000-25,000 of the little buggers to deal with. What a pain it would be to protect all those gigabytes. The only data on my computer should be the data I created. The only data I should worry about backing up is the data I created. Music should be store elsewhere play anywhere.

Update: 12/24/07

I can now play “Fresh Air” through Rhapsody. Several music services have closed or limited their efforts. The big ones are still Rhapsody, Napster and Zune. Rhapsody is expanding its services by partnering with hardware companies like TiVo and cell phone services. Denon is even making a table top radio that has a dock for an iPod, plays XM music, is compatible with MP3 CDs and connects directly to Rhapsody – thus offering the Rhapsody library without a computer. Rhapsody has also made marketing deals to give away songs with hamburgers. They are making a valiant effort to push the concept of subscription music.