iTunes Plus marks your music. So what?

by Volker Weber

A few people have sent me links to stories reporting that the iTunes store is adding people's names and email addresses to the music they purchase, probably assuming that I am against this practice.

Well, I am not.

Adding your name to the stuff you purchase is the ultimate personalization. It says, this stuff is mine. iTunes does not even try to hide the information. You can see it in the Info dialog.

What I am opposed to is restrictions what you can do with the stuff you buy. There are technical restrictions as imposed by DRM. And there are license restrictions which look very stupid at first sight. "You must not use this track as a ring tone" comes to mind.

You still don't like the fact that your iTunes tracks are marked? Convert them to MP3 and be done with it.

Comments

I agree, 100%.

And, btw, the iTunes+ songs sound real well, this is a major improvement.

Pieter Lansbergen, 2007-06-05

"In other news, items that are sent to you via the postal service have metadata which can pinpoint your very home!"

http://www.lifehacker.com/software/itunes/-265617.php


Mike Eckert, 2007-06-05

I was one of the people who referred you to the story; I don't think I was assuming you were against it, just thought it was an interesting next step in the painful story of DRM....

Years ago I ran a small record company - we recorded mainly 'early music' (lutes, crumhorns, viols - that kind of thing!) and as I like to say, we were artistically very successful, and financially disastrous - but it was fun while it lasted!

I am both appalled and slightly amused to find that some of the recordings we made are now available on download sites, some of which make bold claims about their legitimacy and the principled negotiations and license agreements they have made with the owners of the recordings: we have certainly never heard from them, and nor have the musicians! I can't help wondering whether they are doing any better with those recordings than we ever did....

[let's be clear, I am not talking about the iTunes store here!!]

The market for music has transformed in the last few years, and whatever quarrels people may have with the major record companies and their perceived greed, the heaviest and most damaging impact seems to be in the lower rungs of the music and creative worlds. Technology has made it easier to put the music together and make it known, but only the fortunate few can govern what happens to it thereafter.

There is now almost no mechanism for younger, less wealthy music-makers to control the distribution of what they are creating, without the legal department of a major record company or publisher at their back.

If someone chooses to buy a CD or some downloads from them, and then distribute them for free or at their own profit, the musician has no realistic come-back, and no means of ever making any money from their own work.

Does the purchaser of the CD have rights of ownership of the tracks? Should they be able to do anything they like with them? I cannot persuade myself that they should.

I think this situation is sad.

Nick Daisley, 2007-06-05

Nick, your opinion is quite a contrast to what ex-successful musicians complain about: They say that the major record companies have vast archives that they just sit on and don't monetarize. These musicians beg to have their back catalog put on sale as easy accessible downloads, but few record companies do that.

However, one can find their back catalog as illegal downloads. No wonder that fans of rare music turn to these illegal offerings, where you can get unchained, DRM-free music easily.

There is now almost no mechanism for younger, less wealthy music-makers to control the distribution of what they are creating, without the legal department of a major record company or publisher at their back.

Yet there are very few musicians who actually had an income from a major record deal. The percentage of a record's price actually paid to the musicians is ridiciously low.

People tend to forget that being a musician wasn't a well-paid job before MP3 and internet, either.

Hanno Zulla, 2007-06-05

Would it make a difference if the songs were watermarked, i.e. you couldn't remove the "personalization", and possibly not even detect it yourself?

Johannes Wilms, 2007-06-05

I second Volkers opinion. I don't care if my data is inside the ID3 or even watermarked in the file.

I want to use the file with my fictive nonbrand mp3 player (actually I do have an iPod ;). I want to enjoy the music using linux. But for sure I am not going to spread the file in the net.

Sascha Reissner, 2007-06-05

@ Hanno - thanks for the response. I'm not sure that you understood my point though.

No way am I trying to speak for/ apologise for the major companies (heavens, they don't need my help!) except insofar as they do have legal teams who can fight their corner effectively, and might thereby (incidentally) support the musicians themselves.

Rather I was suggesting that it is the outfits who only ever got signed to a small company, or to no company or publisher at all, who can find themselves taken advantage of, by people out there who care nothing for copyrights and royalties.

True, most musicians were never brilliantly well-paid, but with companies like mine they stood to gain a fair income from their work; if material is pirated across the internet, they may get nothing.

It is not entirely unknown (!) for Volker on these pages to suggest that 'DRM is bad for the customer' - well, it may be a flawed mechanism, but perhaps it does give the musician a fighting chance of survival?

(grabs tin hat and runs for cover...)

Nick Daisley, 2007-06-05

Nick, I believe the opposite to be true.

In the age of easily available mp3 files on the internet I still buy two kinds of CDs:

1) When I happen to like popular music, I download it in iTunes.
2) When I am at a concert, I mostly buy the band's CD. (usually I import it in iTunes and never touch it again)

DRM would not make me give my money to any small band, as a matter of fact, I'd rather see them not have it. When I go to a concert of some more or less known Swiss band, I do it to try something new and to support their work. They earn twice, namely from my ticket and from my CD purchase.

I think the internet doesn't make it impossible to sell music for small artists. Piracy hurts mostly the big labels and DRM doesn't do them any good either. Small artists get little money because their fanbase is local, not global, and not because of the lack of DRM.

Philipp Sury, 2007-06-05

This is the ideal solution, in my view. I actually conceived of the same plan five years ago, not to seek credit but to point out how it addresses the two central issues:

Economic Fairness -- People aren't against paying for things but they need a purchase method that works for them. CDs and DRMed downloads do not satisfy the basic purchase criteria for many people, not when it's so easy to just get the same content for free.
Social Benefits -- No one considers himself a thief and there are a million ways to reconcile the cognitive dissonance of grabbing a song or movie off the Internet. Watermarked content relieves that problem altogether by saying, "I paid for this and it's mine forever" -- which is what people wanted in the first place. So instead of the cognitive dissonance of illegal downloading, it's a warm fuzzy for people to manifest their appreciation of the artist, ultimately as a reflection of their own self-image. Win/win.

Again, this is a very fair and pragmatic solution. I'll be making my first online purchases from iTunes or, more likely, the Amazon service to follow. Because if this is what people hope it is, the DRM folly is history.

Arthur Fontaine, 2007-06-06

Enough from me on this matter; but I was interested to see this morning a news item on the BBC site about a new approach sponsored by Peter Gabriel:

"A lot of people under the age of 30 do not buy music anymore, and I think record executives are noticing their kids doing what every other kid is doing, and they, and artists, have to say, 'how do we deal with this?'"

"Established artists like me are going to find all sorts of ways, and you shouldn't worry about us. But you should worry about young artists coming through, and, in our field, world music - a lot of those artists have had 50-60% of their income from record sales.

"So if that's gone, that's a huge thing."

Nick Daisley, 2007-06-06

I heard music composition is getting outsourced to India as they can do it cheaper than our musicians, ok I joke.

Don't most musicians make the majority of their income from touring, merchandising etc? Music has always been stolen, remember tape to tape machines, that was the end of music profits right?

Musicians need to feel down trodden and miserable, it's what makes them write good stuff. The record companies and musicians need to get creative, that's what they're supposed to be good at, they need to figure out how to make people feel like they're getting value for money, and to make sure that spending that money makes them feel good, I customers get that feeling by be treated as if they are potential criminals.

Carl Tyler, 2007-06-06

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