MOTUnation.com

Gee... I must have missed this when it happened. I put a song up on iTunes sort of as a test and sold a few... got some nice reviews too. I chose iTunes under the apparently false assumption that there was DRM built into to any iTunes download. I guess that's not so? You buy a song on iTunes and I guess you can email it to anybody now? Wowee!!

I first learned this when contemplating switching to an Android phone so I could get 4G in my area and perhaps tether my home computers. I found a page that told me how to "Get Info" on my iTunes songs and see if it said "Purchased AAC audio file" or "Protected AAC audio file." I got to admit, I was a little disappointed to see my song that I purchased as a test designated "Purchased" rather than "Protected."

I then found this at TuneCore which is the aggregator I'm currently using:

http://blog.tunecore.com/2009/03/itunes ... r-you.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Gotta say-- came as a surprise to me. So unless I'm mistaken, someone can purchase for 99 cents any song on iTunes that's recent after the change took effect, and then email that file to anybody and there it is... out there for everyone. I guess with LimeWire shut down it won't be that bad. Just crazy... I don't get why Apple dropped DRM.

I do not like that at all.

I feel like an idiot for missing this news. Apparently it happened sometime last year. Doh! If you had music on iTunes previously, it's still protected, but after that there's no DRM whatsoever. I had assumed that iTunes was secure.

And before anybody says it-- no... I don't expect to make a lot of money from online music sales. Just disappointed that the one outlet I thought I'd go with was secure. I was having a discussion with someone the other day about Rhapsody. He was telling me that in some ways Rhapsody is more secure? Don't know. Can't distribute to Rhapsody right now via TuneCore anyway.

The genie really and truly is out of the bottle. Yeesh.

Well... more I think about it (and I shouldn't right now as I have a cold/flu coming on)... it just really feels like recorded music is being obliterated. There is only room for the mega artists and everyone less than that is toast. Of course Apple still has DRM on movies and TV shows.

Maybe Steve Jobs would like to break new ground there and offer all the Pixar titles without DRM? What say you, Steve?

iTunes Plus first introduced DRM-free downloads in May 2007. I believe that all iTunes music is now in this format.

Cheers

Stephen

Well... as an alternative point of view, I refused to buy anything from iTunes because of DRM. While DRM might have prevented a user from sending your song to his friends, it was a huge headache to all the honest music purchasers, with inevitable troubles transferring protected files to different computers and devices.

I wanna be able to count on my Mp3 library being playable 5-10-15-20 years from now when I am many computers down the road. DRM was a threat to the longevity of all iTunes music purchases, and I was glad to see it eliminated. I believe that complaints about this punishment to honest customers is exactly why the protection scheme was discontinued.

zed wrote:Well... as an alternative point of view, I refused to buy anything from iTunes because of DRM. While DRM might have prevented a user from sending your song to his friends, it was a huge headache to all the honest music purchasers, with inevitable troubles transferring protected files to different computers and devices.

I wanna be able to count on my Mp3 library being playable 5-10-15-20 years from now when I am many computers down the road. DRM was a threat to the longevity of all iTunes music purchases, and I was glad to see it eliminated. I believe that complaints about this punishment to honest customers is exactly why the protection scheme was discontinued.

Sorry about your experience James, but I am in total agreement with the above. Especially this:

I wanna be able to count on my Mp3 library being playable 5-10-15-20 years from now when I am many computers down the road. DRM was a threat to the longevity of all iTunes music purchases, and I was glad to see it eliminated.

Witness MS's abandonment of SurePlay (or was it PlaySure or something) and the 12 folks who invested in building a catalogue of tunes in that product.

I just wish I could legally de-DRM the mountain of music I bought already so that I don't have problems down the road.

On a different note: Can you share a link to your tune?

No, I hear you. I just don't have much faith in relying on the self-restraint and integrity of the general public. Imagine all DRM was removed from all music software and plug ins. Maybe MOTU could start "touring" and sell MOTU T-shirts and hoodies?

James Steele wrote:Maybe MOTU could start "touring" and sell MOTU T-shirts and hoodies?

That's the ticket, James. In fact that's what ALL makers of intellectual property should do. Software developers, dancers, actors, actresses, film makers, you name it. They should all give their stuff away and sell T-shirts. ..And hoodies. Can't make the big bucks without selling hoodies. Maybe then people would realize how real this problem is. I'm with you on this one, James. Just sayin'.

I can see a time when we look back at the good old days. "Once upon a time, art was actually a profession, son. I know it's hard to believe..."

Phil

Apple's main reason for DRM in the first place was to get the larger publishers on iTunes. Steve Jobs was quite public in his opposition to it otherwise. The DRM itself was quite ineffective, and it is doubtful that Apple cared one way or another what people did with their song downloads. You could always burn songs to a disk from iTunes and then reimport them. And the initial release of iTunes 5.0 ignored DRM.

I had more than one instance of songs from iTunes that somehow lost their authorization, and had to contact Apple to get a new download. Agree with Zed that Apple DRM was a PITA.

bayswater wrote:Agree with Zed that Apple DRM was a PITA.

Not arguing that. But the existence of that PITA reminded me that somebody, somewhere at least put up the *pretense* that digital downloads weren't supposed to be shared. It's a PITA that we have to carry car keys and house keys too. It would be easier if we had no need for locks. How many times have any of us locked ourselves out of our house or our car? "Keys are a hassle! We need to get rid of them!"

I have no doubt that removing DRM was popular for the *consumer*-- I just wonder what it means for smaller, independent labels, etc. Of course, I understand that a band or artist must work really hard to attain the status of "theft-worthy." I imagine there may be a certain plateau where an artist scratches his or her head and says "I wonder why sales have leveled off? We're much better known than we were a year ago?" It seems that for all the "empowerment" that we've heard the Internet has meant for independent artists, one of the things it may have helped reinforce is an even greater need for some sort of huge promotion budget to get over the hump, which is where the majors came in.

You wanna hear something cynical? We all hated the idea of those mean major labels putting the screws to the consumer, and they may have gotten greedy, but somebody had to do it if anybody was to get paid. Dunno. I don't necessarily see what has transpired over that last 20 years as being much better for artists than when the majors dominated.

The part I don't understand is why the music industry doesn't come down hard on other sites where people freely share music files. You can get everything under the sun, available for free downloading, with binary retentions of up to 2 years. If new releases (like the Beatles Remastered albums, for example) can be uploaded to such "legal" sites and be freely downloaded, and even the lawyers at Apple Records can't get that stuff taken down, then that is a very serious problem for the industry.

Friends sharing songs with friends is a minor problem compared with those songs being available to be searched and freely downloaded by anyone on the planet.

zed wrote:Friends sharing songs with friends is a minor problem compared with those songs being available to be searched and freely downloaded by anyone on the planet.

Agreed. But I think two other factors come into play:

1) It's not friends sharing with friends-- but friends sharing with strangers today.
[EDIT: Sorry... Reread your post and that's essentially what you just said.]

2) No generational loss like when making analog copies. This is you how you have that whole exponential numbers problem. Remember that old shampoo commercial: "she told two friends, and they told two friends, and so on... and so on..." Perfect digital copies as good as the original source every time.

People talk about when people used to make cassettes of LPs years ago. Or use dubbing decks. But anybody who makes a cassette copy of a copy of a copy is going to have something that's not very listenable at all.

Not a new idea at all: but perhaps the most successful DRM scheme ever created was serendipitous. It was called "analog" and none of us knew then that we were on borrowed time.

James Steele wrote:

bayswater wrote:Agree with Zed that Apple DRM was a PITA.

Not arguing that. But the existence of that PITA reminded me that somebody, somewhere at least put up the *pretense* that digital downloads weren't supposed to be shared. It's a PITA that we have to carry car keys and house keys too. It would be easier if we had no need for locks. How many times have any of us locked ourselves out of our house or our car? "Keys are a hassle! We need to get rid of them!"

Sure, death and taxes are a PITA too, but they're necessary and unavoidable. But copy protection can be done different ways, and not all of them are equally invasive or unreliable, as we have discussed here many times when iLok etc come up. Apple could have done better.

Right. Just who knows what is better? There's always supposed to be a better way to do it, but nobody knows what that is yet.