Mac

That local band I used to work with has been doing the official “bootleg” thing to the tune of about 3 million units over the course of the last few tours. Available day after show, no DRM, 192k mp3 files. For grins I checked a few of the big P2P nets to see how many of the tracks were being shared freely. It’s easier to get the one hit wonder “Big in Japan” from file sharing than it is these official bootlegs that are available without DRM. I think that shoots down the whole DRM thing.

The gift is still an email or print out of the transaction and not the tune itself. But still better than a gift cert. I can burn it on a CD and give it to you but I can’t give it to you online unless you have iTunes (v 6.0 at least) and an account at iTMS. As far as Winer is concerned, I’ve seen him speak several times and don’t put too much stock in his ranting though I’m sure lot’s of folks say the same about me…

Good to hear from you William, give your family my regards.

(The simplicity of this process would seem to fly in the face of Dave Winer et al.’s assertions that iTunes is impossible to use….)

Also, the Cancel button on the page that you get when you click “Gift This Music” (on an album page) doesn’t actually work for me. Bug, I guess. The Back button works just as well.

There are a couple of ways you can do the gifting thing. If you just want to give a particular song or album, you need to get to the relevant album page. Then click on “Gift This Music” to the right of the album-cover image. (I’m not sure when “gift” became a verb, but whatever.) From there, you can “gift” the whole album or any of the individual songs.

You can also “gift” a custom playlist of songs. This requires that you haven’t unchecked “Show links -> to the Music Store” in iTunes’ General preferences. You can then click on the arrow next to any of your playlists in the Source pane, and choose Give Playlist in the resulting dialog box.

From my post on Slashdot:

I think your real question is not about why you can’t convert music from DRM format to non-DRM format. Honestly the fact that DRM music exists is what makes the only online music purchase possible. Did you expect the recrod companies to publish the music in any other way in our changing world. I forsee a time when CDs are phased out, because they can be copied easier than DRM music downloaded from an online store. Originially CDs and albums weren’t that easy to copy when they were first introduced.

I guess your real question is why isn’t there an open standard for DRM? Beats me. I think it is ultimately very self defeating for companies to maintain closed standards.

I work in the field of live pro audio, and there standards are openly published and manufacturers readily adopt them because a) it is a selling point by itself and b)in that industry its widely assumed that your company doesn’t make the best product of everything an end user needs. In other words, they know that you are going to be using ABCs product together with XYZs or Blah company’s product. Therefore they must adopt open standards in order to even be a consideration.

I guess in the computer industry that attitude doesn’t exist and everyone thinks that their product is the shit or whatever. Frankly that needs to change, and what its going to take to execute such a change, I do not know.

-Mikey P

In the end I think it all comes down to what the consumer will bear. Someone replied to me that they didn’t think that the music companies will survive if they continue, but it appears that the public is willing to bear their antics and further their over marketed mediocre product. Caveat emptor.

From my post on Slashdot:

I think your real question is not about why you can’t convert music from DRM format to non-DRM format. Honestly the fact that DRM music exists is what makes the only online music purchase possible. Did you expect the recrod companies to publish the music in any other way in our changing world. I forsee a time when CDs are phased out, because they can be copied easier than DRM music downloaded from an online store. Originially CDs and albums weren’t that easy to copy when they were first introduced.

I guess your real question is why isn’t there an open standard for DRM? Beats me. I think it is ultimately very self defeating for companies to maintain closed standards.

I work in the field of live pro audio, and there standards are openly published and manufacturers readily adopt them because a) it is a selling point by itself and b)in that industry its widely assumed that your company doesn’t make the best product of everything an end user needs. In other words, they know that you are going to be using ABCs product together with XYZs or Blah company’s product. Therefore they must adopt open standards in order to even be a consideration.

I guess in the computer industry that attitude doesn’t exist and everyone thinks that their product is the shit or whatever. Frankly that needs to change, and what its going to take to execute such a change, I do not know.

-Mikey P