Apple’s iPod has almost 80 percent of the US music player market, while iTunes has 70 percent of US digital music sales. Other online music stores cannot sell music files encoded with Apple’s DRM, and competing devices cannot play these files. With such a dominance, the rest of the competitors had to do something to increase their sales.
Microsoft decided to build their own music player. “Under the Zune brand, we will deliver a family of hardware and software products, the first of which will be available this year,” said Chris Stephenson, general manager of market for entertainment and services at Microsoft. “We see a great opportunity to bring together technology and community to allow consumers to explore and discover music together.” And, of course, a great opportunity to increase their small sales. Microsoft also has MSN Music Store and Urge, an online music store in partnership with MTV, that sell music for PlaysForSure devices like Zen Vision in WMA format and protected with Microsoft’s DRM.
On the other hand, Yahoo thought it would be better to sell MP3s without DRM, not because they care too much about the consumer, but because they want to sell music to iPod users. Their first test is a Jessica Simpson MP3 that costs $1.99 and supports “customization”: you can hear your name in the song. They basically do a digital watermarking to prevent file-sharing. The song will include watermarks that store information about the buyer, that’s useful if the MP3 is found on a P2P network or on a site. What does Yahoo say? “As you know, we’ve been publicly trying to convince record labels that they should be selling MP3s for a while now. Our position is simple: DRM doesn’t add any value for the artist, label (who are selling DRM-free music every day — the Compact Disc), or consumer, the only people it adds value to are the technology companies who are interested in locking consumers to a particular technology platform. We’ve also been saying that DRM has a cost. It’s very expensive for companies like Yahoo! to implement. We’d much rather have our engineers building better personalization, recommendations, playlisting applications, community apps, etc, instead of complex provisioning systems which at the end of the day allow you to burn a CD and take the DRM back off, anyway!”
Files downloaded from Apple’s music store come with Apple’s DRM – called FairPlay (isn’t that ironic?). Songs are encoded using FairPlay-encrypted 128 kbit/s AAC streams in an MP4 wrapper. Let’s see the restrictions of FairPlay:
* number of machines allowed to use purchased music within 24 hours: 5
* number of times you can CDs of the same playlist: 7
* only iPod and a small number of Motorola phones (Motorola ROKR E1, Motorola RAZR V3i) can play the files.
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I have a Creative Zen Sleek Photo and couldn’t be happier. Works amazingly with Windows Media Player 11.
There’s always a way to get around things. I discovered completely by accident that when you burn the Protected AAC files to a disk as a standard audio CD they lose their protection. I went to transfer the songs to my iPod and to my surprise the disk contents had no volume! What does this mean you might ask? Well iTunes does not recognize the contents of the disk so when I transferred the so-called protected AAC files back into iTunes they transferred as either standard AAC or MP3 files (depending on the default setting in the preferences). Once this happens then SURPRISE! You can transfer the files to any MP3 player. So do yourself a favor and invest in a CD-RW blank disk. Do the transfers then erase the disk until you’re ready to transfer the next batch of files. You can transfer up to 80 minutes at a time (the maximum capacity of the disk).
No offense but I think pretty much everyone here knew that already.
Encodes it with my personal information? Excuse me? This is bullshit. When are they going to get over this total control thing? Aggressive attempts at total control are usually met with revolt and revolution and that’s what they’re going to get. I will continue to make most of my mp3 files using audio recording software; if it comes out of your speakers it can be recorded. In this new age of digital music files I am proud to say that I have not bought one single mp3 file. Subscribe to a music service or satillite radio and use your audio recording software (like Music Replay for example…Google it) and you have perfect mp3’s (but burn them to regular CD’s…they sound the best in that format; so you can’t have 1000 songs with you. Do you know how long it takes to listen to 1000 songs? You’ll be in another stage of your life by then!) And of course there’s still the old file sharing networks. Whatever I can’t get using the method I just described I still file share. Some artists like The Black Eyed Peas and other “super acts” are too good to put all of their songs on the music services. You get 15-second bites instead. So just go into file sharing and there they are! That’s my method right now. If all of this gets messed up I will adapt but I will NEVER buy a song on line. As VdoNgneer said “There’s always a way to get around things.”
burd’s right but you still have to give them credit for trying. i doubt that corperations will ever trust us enough to give us what we demand but they arent ignoring us and that is a good first step