Apple says No! to music rentals
p2pnet.net news:- Whatever else one might say about Apple’s Steve Jobs, he’s a spin-meister extraordinaire who knows the mainstream media and Apple punters, the way they think and how best to push their various buttons.
Various entertainment cartel elements are trying hard to sell the idea of kamikaze movie and music rentals, that’s to say music libraries which self destruct when people stop paying monthly subscriptions, and movie downloads which melt (figuratively speaking) after a pre-determined number of hours.
Subscriptions, in other words. Rentals. And the likes of the near-dead Napster II (or is it III?) have been trying to promote the idea for years, with a marked lack of success.
But Jobs says he’s, “unlikely to give in to calls from the music industry to add a subscription-based model” to iTunes, says Reuters. “Never say never, but customers don’t seem to be interested in it,” Jobs told Reuters. “The subscription model has failed so far.”
EMI (Britain), Vivendi Universal (France), Sony BMG (Japan and Germany) and Warner Music (US), the members of the Big 4 music cartel, have been hoping iTunes would, “ultimately start, in effect, renting music online, so record companies can make more money from recurring income,” says the story, but, “Jobs said he had seen little consumer demand for that”.
“People want to own their music,” Reuters has Jobs saying, although iTunes and the music players it was created to service and promote are infamously locked up tight with DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) consumer control technologies such as the appallingly misnamed FairPlay ‘copyright protection’ application.
The story also pumps what’s become the disingenuous Apple party line that Jobs is against DRM.
“There are a lot of people in the other music companies who are very intrigued by it,” Jobs said of the move to sell songs without copy-protection software, states Reuters. “They’re thinking very hard about it right now.
“We’ve said by the end of this year, over half of the songs we offer on iTunes we believe will be in DRM-free versions,” Jobs said. “I think we’re going to achieve that.”
Also See:
Reuters – Jobs says Apple customers not into renting music, April 26, 2007
If your Net access is blocked by governBryan Adams slams Net radio hikement restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at thIs the endSurvey: How Did Copyright Infringement Become Equated with Robbery? (of the Net) nigh?zze University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.
rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php | | And use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site
Tired of being treated like a criminal? They depend on you, not the other way around. Don’t buy their ‘product’. Do bug your local politicians. Use emails, snail-mail, phone calls, faxes, IM, stop them in the street, blog. And if you’re into organizing, organize petitions, organize demonstrations and then turn up on your local political rep’s doorstep, making sure you’ve contacted your local tv/radio station/newspaper in advance. Don’t just complain. Do something!
April 27th, 2007 at 10:08 am
sageadvisors[at]gmail.com
Perhaps most people want to own their music but when the just say
“People want to own their music,” they assume that that’s how everyone feels.
I don’t. I rarely buy music. i “rent” I like it that way. even if i am in the minority i prefer subscription to buying and even prefer subscription to p2p
free and legal subscription like spiral frog is good to. i have tried the canadian preview.
April 27th, 2007 at 4:21 pm
There is a problem with subscriptions…
Greed! Both Jobs and the RIAA are in this to make money, and they both realized that using DRM and subscription services are a sure fire way to make as much money as they can on the music that they sell.
Sell, that is a big word for four little letters. Sell means that you bought a product from a person and the person shouldn’t care how you use the product. Sell means that the person who had the product can’t get the product back by sabatoging the product simply because they didn’t like how you use the product. Finally, sell means that there are no strings attached to the product.
Both Jobs and the RIAA are putting strings on digital music sales via DRM and locking iTunes sales to only play on the iPod.
Jobs is lying about being an anti-DRM champion if even he won’t allow sales from his own store to be played on third-party mp3 players.
The RIAA always been and always will be lying cheating scum for suing anyone who doesn’t conform to their draconian business model, and getting congress to pass laws that make 90% of americans criminals.
My point is that if the RIAA is so bound up in their control over digital music sales right now, what do you think they would do if they insist on subscription fees on top of their sales?
April 29th, 2007 at 3:15 pm
You are in effect renting music anyway. You don’t actually own it after all. You are simply licenced to use the music to the extent set out in their EULA.
The reason they use the words ‘buy’/’sell’, is to enable them to fetch a much higher price. When you buy a a chocolate bar from a store, you have bought it, id est, you own it, and may do with it as you like. The same however cannot be said for music.
There is a clear distinction between the two, it’s simply not apparent because big business attempts to conceal it.