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Play that funky music

January 9th, 2009 · Posted by Skuds in Technology · 2 Comments · Technology

I would have written about this last night, had I not fallen into a deep sleep on the sofa as soon as I got home from work and had a sandwich: Apple say they are getting rid of DRM on lots of tracks on iTunes now and will soon get rid of it completely.  This is big news, and should have a positive impact, even on those of us who refuse to let iTunes anywhere near their computers.

DRM is a pain in the neck.  I am not against musicians or record companies protecting their income, but I have had some DRM-protected tunes in the past and eventually gave up and deleted them.  The indirect benefit to us iTunesphobics is that now the precedent is there, other companies who persist in using DRM will immediately become less attractive than iTunes so they will get forced to offer DRM-free music. This, in turn, might pave the way for iTunes to be less of a monopoly – and monopolies are never a good thing.

Having said that, the recent entry into the download market of a big player like Amazon was probably going to do that anyway.

I see they are also dropping their one-price-fits-all model, which really is a surprise.

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2 Comments so far ↓

  • Rob Glover

    I realise this may start an ideological war that may dwarf the Arab-Israili conflict… but exactly why do you refuse to have Itunes anywhere near your computer?

  • Skuds

    A yes – a holy war to rival the ongoing Mac/PC/Unix operating systems stand-off.

    I actually can’t remember all the details now, but I did have iTunes on a previous PC when Frankie had an iPod Nano. I do remember it annoying me a lot even if I can’t recall all the ways it did that. (And I may be confusing some of them with the Sony mp3 player software which is even worse)

    I was peeved as a matter of principle that there was no choice: if you had an iPod you had to have iTunes. I am used to iRiver and Creative where you can use their own software, 3rd-party software, Windows Media Player, or just drag & drop.

    I didn’t like the implicit pressure to do everything in AAC which in turn ties you into the iTunes/iPod route. I didn’t like the way installing iTunes caused all sorts of files to use it as default without asking, and unless you were careful it also installed Quicktime and make that the default for movies.

    That was a few years ago and maybe it is all different now, but after the boy trashed the iPod it took forever to stop iTunes continually trying to take everything over. I have a natural inclination to pick & mix, to use different packages for different purposes and so Apples idea of tying the online store to the PC software and the player and removing those options just goes against the way I tend to work.

    More trivially, I also have an aversion to the Apple look and feel – like with Safari.