Music industry watch

Are more online music services a bad idea?

Apparently it's hip to start your own music download service. Apple did it well, buymusic did it badly and now MusicMatch and Dell are doing it. Roxio is bringing Napster back and M$ is rumored to jump into the fray. Roxio/Samsung and Dell are even creating portable devices to work with these services.

A few years ago I would've been overjoyed at so many online services being launched. But now I'm not quite so enthusiastic about it anymore. The problem is that each one of these services has their own custom brewed DRM scheme to keep people from fully enjoying their music. Do you think that a Napster track will run on my iPod? I doubt it. Do you think that the Dell music service will be available to Mac users? I doubt it.

Each of these services lock in their users -- little to no moving files from one machine to another. Few choices for moving files to portable devices. Crappy and complicated download processes that are riddled with bugs. In other words, it's a total mess.

And what is even worse is that all these DRM islands are shutting out third party tool/service providers. How can you offer cool high end audio jukebox software/hardware and hope to offer integration to online music services when you need to establish contracts and license crappy DRM tech from multiple vendors? I bet that it would be impossible to setup one machine that uses two competing DRM systems based on Windows Media Player 9.

Speaking of Windows Media Player 9, Philips refuses to play with WMP9:

Philips, which globally ranks No. 3 behind Japan's Sony and Matsushita, has chosen not to support Microsoft's Windows Media Player in its consumer electronics products, a company spokesman said separately. "We need a technology that works, that is available to everyone, managed in a fair way and not constrained to any particular group," Blanford said.

Earlier I posted about David Weinberger's Copy Protection Is a Crime article, and I think the current situation with the online music services is a perfect example of what he was talking about. Sigh.

And one final footnote -- how can EMusic hope to survive in this din of crappy download services??

Posted by Mayhem at September 27, 2003 10:51 AM