Hilary Rosen to Steve Jobs:
p2pnet.net News:- “The new iPod my girlfriend gave me is a trap. Yeah, it is great looking and I really love the baby blue leather case but when, oh when, will Steve Jobs let me buy music from somewhere other than the Apple iTunes store and put it on my iPod?”
A frustrated iPod aficionado? Obviously. But it’s none other than Hilary Rosen, the ex-boss of the RIAA (Recording Industry Assocation of America).
And her comments are particularly ripe given that she’s one of the handful of people who are primarily responsible for the fact music in the digital 21st century is fettered to the gills.
Be that as it may, “I spent 17 years in the music business the last several of which were all about pushing and prodding the painful development of legitimate on-line music,” she says on the Huffington Post.
Then, predictably, she goes on to list the various plastic music sites backed and supplied by her former employers, the owners of the Big Four record label cartel, also pointing out there are all kinds of portables out there able to play the mp3s the cartels force the corporate stores to charge a dollar and more for.
Force? Yep. By virtue of the fact they wholesale them for, we’re told, a mind-boggling 65 to 70 cents per, which is pretty good for an mp3 that’s nothing more than a lo-fi copy of an existing hi-fi digital file.
“Most every player device works at every one of these ‘stores’ and it is pretty easy to keep all the songs, no matter where you got them, in a single folder or ‘jukebox’ on your computer,” says Rosen, going on:
“The problem is that the iPod only works with either songs that you buy from the on-line Apple iTunes store or songs that you rip from your own CD’s. But those other music sites have lots of music that you can’t get at the iTunes store. So, if you have an iPod, you are out of luck.”
She raises Jobs to god status but, “keeping the iTunes system a proprietary technology to prevent anyone from using multiple (read Microsoft) music systems is the most anti-consumer and user unfriendly thing any god can do. Is this the same Jobs that railed for years about the Microsoft monopoly? Is taking a page out of their playbook the only way to have a successful business? If he isn’t careful Bill Gates might just Betamax him while the crowds cheer him on. Come on Steve – open it up.
“Why am I complaining about this?
“Why isn’t everyone?”
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See:-
Huffington Post – Steve Jobs, Let my Music Go, May 9, 2005
May 9th, 2005 at 6:28 pm
Now she knows how us “pirates” feel.
May 9th, 2005 at 6:33 pm
Translation of RosenSpeak to English: “My favorite colour is Microsoft, and your colour is Apple, so therefore everyone should have to use Microsoft and not Apple”.
The sites she supports are *NOT* supported by other players. They use Microsoft DRM which is no more open than Apple’s DRM. This isn’t about freedom of choice, it is about agreeing with Rosen’s choice OR ELSE.
May 9th, 2005 at 8:25 pm
she’s the one who wanted to protect the industry from the Pirates. DRM is their answer. why can’t she download an MP3 from another pay site and just put it on the I pod? Better yet someone should email her the .EXE file of Kaza Lite so she can get all she wants for her Ipod.
Rick
May 9th, 2005 at 8:47 pm
Same old story with Apple… Think of what the world might have been if they had let hardware OEM’s into the collective. Instead, they have to be everything or they are nothing, and we are still running Windoze. It will come back to bite them again, Hilary is right.
May 9th, 2005 at 10:18 pm
Actually the iPod does support an open format. It’s called DRM free MP3.
Just Say No To DRM
May 10th, 2005 at 1:37 am
It is pretty clear, Hilary has some points, but seems to be under the impression because Microsoft systems are more widespread that that makes them more “popular” or just that theres no alternative.
Don’t use DRM files. Don’t use iTMS, fools.
Hey – don’t buy an iPod. When you pick up that package, you agree to use iTunes. iTunes was (and still is, for me) a pretty simple, effective ripper and library manager a few years back, use it as one. Buy a CD.
And it is only so long before DAPs saturate the market, profits will become razor thin and the extreme mark-up Apple enjoys putting on its products will no longer be viable. Send in the clones, open up FairPlay.
May 10th, 2005 at 11:49 am
:::YAWN:::
Buy yourself one of those creative mp3 players then and quit yer whining.
May 10th, 2005 at 1:43 pm
“Why isn’t everyone (complaining about this)?”
*****************************************************
duh, WE ARE! we have been for years!
you just haven’t been listening, you asswipe. how does it feel to be proved wrong?
May 10th, 2005 at 11:04 pm
She has it all wrong. It’s Apple’s fault you can’t play music from the ITMS on anything but an iPod. It’s YOUR (points finger at Hilary) fault you can’t play music from other paysites on anything but an iPod. The solution: Just buy CD’s and rip them….oh wait, you can’t do that anymore either, because new CD’s are being released with Copy-control, which hasn’t even been successfully tested, and causes computer crashes. Now whose fault is that? So now it would seem that the only way to get music for whatever portable device you use is to “steal” it. Idiots. In your efforts to stamp out piracy, you’ve confirmed it.
May 11th, 2005 at 12:14 am
It’s fear plain and simple. They are afraid that Apple will become the wal-mart of the music world able to dictate prices and terms. They want people to be able to use their ipods on other services because then if the RIAA puts the screws to Apple forcing them out of business. The ipod users can simply move on to a smaller service that the RIAA is able to influence easier.
May 11th, 2005 at 1:28 am
Copy-Control is a farce.
I’ve had it initially stop me ripping a CD on a Windows box, but not ONCE have i even had a minor error in ripping CD’s via iTunes on my Mac.
less/un-popular systems are cool: no virus’, inadequate implemetation of copy-control, feelings of superiority when SPII is mentioned.