Apple and Motorola -
p2pnet.net News:- Apple is a world expert at equine excreta. By dint of this the mainstream media and, hence, hundreds of thousands of punters, are now convinced Apple is indeed All.
The Register’s Andrew Orlowski noted the recent deal between Motorola and Apple under which, “Apple will create a new iTunes mobile music player, which Motorola will make the standard music application on all their mass-market music phones, expected to be available in the first half of next year.”
It was also “a triumph for Steve Jobs’ Reality Distortion Field, and the first sign that the music industry is starting to see DRM as a real business opportunity, as Orlowski points out. “Having already sold you your old vinyl as cassettes, then CDs, producers old and new are going to sell you rights you already enjoy – only this time at a premium.”
Much like a burglar giving the burgled householder first opportunity to buy their own stuff back, Apple is promising a right we already enjoy as a bonus, says Orlowski, going on that having set the bar so low at 128kbps encoding – and the price at 99 cents per song, so high – one of the premiums that the music industry will now be able to offer is ‘fair use’.
“In order to get the public to accept this proposition they must first forget that they ever had the right to make a copy of music they’d bought. And that’s the true significance of today’s announcement,” Orlowski states.
Device manufacturers and carriers see DRM more of a way of inducing the content owners to making music available digitally than as a solution and hope the phone or portable player will become the transaction vehicle and the principle mass market music storage device; at first by allowing on the spot downloads from conventional stores, over WiFi or a future high-bandwidth wireless technology, probably UWB, and perhaps eventually over 3G or 4G.
“The carriers don’t actually need you to download music over their network, they simply want to take a cut of the transaction,” Orlowski says, adding:
“On the other hand, the favorable press for online download sites such as iTunes, despite their insignificant volumes, is beginning to convince the music industry they can have their cake and eat it too. With the help of the online music stores, DRM can be a money-spinner.
“With CD sales back on the rise, and a new marketing opportunity at hand, why would they think otherwise?”
July 28th, 2004 at 4:56 pm
Silly question, are the new mp3-capable phones hobbled in the same way as their foreign predecesors? If I remember correctly there was a whole debacle in Korea between the music companies and the phone manufacturers about the mp3 playback quality. There was concern that if the playback was not restricted to 64 kbs consumers might increase their mp3 consumption. Is the DRM they want to put into it mandatory or would you also be able to port you own mp3s onto the phone?