mult.ifario.us

When the Sprial Frog relationship with Universal was announced, I was tentatively intrigued and waited for the catch to come out. This is in spite of the fact that I can't think of any artists on major labels that I give a hoot about. Once the first sketchy details were out about having to watch ads, it sounded like a job for Mechanical Turk — I can have a remote human watch the ads on my behalf for a nominal fee. The idea had a certain impish appeal in that I'm certain that the advertisers wouldn't want their demographic to be people somewhere in the world who'd sit through an ad for a nickel, but it was all mooted when it the details of Spiral Frog's plans for regressive DRM came out. I'm going to have to think about other opportunities where MechTurk could provide an acceptable-cost route around other on-line annoyances.

Now, as for the obsession with DRM,...

Consumer: (in raspy falsetto) I'd like to download some music, but I don't like DRM.

Waiter: (earnestly) Well, we've got some Same-Old-Same-Old; that's got DRM, ads, music, and DRM. That's not much DRM.

Consumer: (angrily) I don't like DRM!

Chorus of Record Labels: DRM DRM DRM, D-R-M D-R-M...

Bloody Vikings.

OK, Yahoo!, you got my $1.99, but not because I'm a fan of Jessica Simpson's music. Like the vote I cast for John Kerry (i.e., against George Jr.), I'll vote for Jessica Simpson if it's a vote against DRM. So, what's next?

It takes some big hairy coconuts to knock on someone's front door and announce that you'd like to eat their lunch, so I assume that Kristopher Tate is half man and half palm tree. (The usual approach is to sneak up on them, even just a little bit, but then you don't usually ape their name, either...) On the other hand, either you suck or you don't suck. Either your business is solid or it isn't. Either you have a complete product or you don't. Either your customers love you or they don't. Either you can move faster than your competitors or you can't. Refusal to compete is admission of weakness, so it's great to see Flickr step up to Zoomr's challenge.

On the flip side, I see my Flickr photos as just that — mine. So don't use feudalistic control of your API as pseudo-DRM to lock me into your service, unless you want to ensure that I'll take my business elsewhere on principle. Instead of creating competitors by forcing people to work around you, either go so fast that no one can keep up or ensure that your service is so open, so flexible, and so compelling that people extend it rather than imitate it with minor twists.

We've become almost exclusively digital music consumers. It's easily been six months since we bought our last CD, and a Squeezebox has replaced a CD player as the primary means of playing music in some parts of the house. After some experimentation with SoftSqueeze as a client for the Slimserver that streams music to the Squezebox, I settled on a combination of the headless squeezeslave player with some shell scripts that use the web interface to the Slimserver (via curl) to play, pause, skip, and shuffle, e.g.:

#!/bin/sh
curl -s http://slim.internal:9000/status_header.html\
\?p0=pause\&player=172.16.1.201 > /dev/null

So far, so good with leaving iTunes behind. Now I just need to write a Quicksilver integration...

I have a few hundred DRM-hobbled MP3s from the iTunes Music Store, but I've decided that it no longer deserves my business. Most of the music that I like is available DRM-free and in higher-bitrate encoding from Bleep, and when what I'm looking for is not available someplace like eMusic, paying a little more for a CD will get me both a version that I can play on a Squeezebox and the good feeling that I'm not supporting a world view that includes DRM.

I'm not opposed to rights, per se, but I like to be able to exercise them. The iTunes model seemed reasonable enough, but the Squeezebox changed my mind. I can't listen to iTunes-encrypted music on the Squeezebox because Apple hasn't licensed the necessary software to SlimDevices. Why should I have to pay whatever incremental cost the licensing would add to the cost of the Squeezebox in order to exercise the rights that I purchased through iTunes? (Yes, I realize that I can strip the DRM, use icecast to redirect audio streams, etc. — all of which is more trouble than paying the incremental cost of a CD.)

It wouldn't take much for someone to win my business — $1.50/song, $11/album, no DRM, high bitrate, critical mass of artists/labels, and something reasonable for community (“also bought”, etc.) or similarity (e.g., taxonomy). Any takers for iTunes “2.0”? (No, the subscription models from Real and Yahoo! are just 1.1 efforts in my view.)

Update: It looks like the French have similar sensibilities:

[...] “It will force some proprietary systems to be opened up ... You have to be able to download content and play it on any device,” Vanneste told Reuters in a telephone interview on Monday [...]

Good wine, good food, device independence... Vive la France!